University Funding

Gordon Brown: When it comes to the work of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions: unemployment is down; employment is up; more single parents are in jobs; fewer people are claiming incapacity benefit; more long-term unemployed people are getting back to work; and, since my right hon. Friend became Secretary of State, hundreds of contracts have been signed with local employers to get thousands of people back to work. That is why I have confidence in what he is doing.

Gordon Brown: But it is not. Inflation is 2.1 per cent. The hon. Lady makes an important point: energy prices have been rising—coal, oil and gas—by 60 to 80 per cent. in every part of the world. Food prices have been rising as a result of what has happened to the harvest. Therefore, it is all the more remarkable that our inflation is 2.1 per cent., when it is 3 per cent. in the euro area and 4 per cent. in America, on the same comparable index. That is why we have been able to bring down interest rates in the past few months, but they have not been able to do so in the euro area. We approach the global financial turbulence with low inflation, low interest rates and high employment, and if we can make the right long-term decisions on the economy, we can withstand the global financial turbulence. To say that oil and other commodity prices are going and that we still have low inflation shows the achievement in getting inflation down.

Chris Grayling: I beg to move,
	That this House expresses its very great concern that National Insurance numbers appear to have been issued to illegal immigrants.
	Britain today has nearly 5 million people claiming out-of-work benefits. Despite £3 billion spent on the Government's new deal, we have higher youth unemployment than 10 years ago. We have half a million people under the age of 35 claiming incapacity benefit. According to Ministers, a million IB claimants in all want to work. We have parts of Britain where as few as one in four adults of working age are working. We have a greater proportion of children being brought up in workless households than any other country in Europe.
	And what are the Government doing? Handing national insurance numbers to tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. Some people might call that incompetence. Just when the Secretary of State thought that things could not get any worse, the chaos spreads to another part of his job. What we know for certain is that 6,000 illegal immigrants have been issued with national insurance numbers by his Department, giving them an official stamp of approval to go and get a job. We have figures that strongly suggest that the real number is much higher. That is Britain today under this Government. All that happened while the Secretary of State was too busy getting on with his two jobs in Government to sort out the confusion with his campaign finances. What utter chaos!
	To be frank, in the past few months we have seen a whole series of calamities for the Secretary of State on this important issue. We first had a sense that something was wrong last September, during the fiasco over the statistics on migrant workers; you will remember that, Mr. Speaker. The Secretary of State told us then that only 700,000 of the jobs created in Britain since 1997 had gone to migrant workers. We disputed his figure and suggested that the number was much higher. "No," said the Secretary of State, "It's 700,000." A month later he said, "We've got the figure wrong—it's not 700,000, but 1.1 million." We know that the Secretary of State is not much good at adding up, but losing 400,000 people is almost as improbable as losing £100,000 of campaign contributions. Even the 1.1 million figure may not be right; the Office for National Statistics has since told us that it thinks that as many as 80 per cent. of the new jobs created since 1997 may have gone to people moving to the UK from overseas. No wonder the Secretary of State wanted to keep things private. Can he really tell the House today exactly how many people from overseas have come to Britain to work in the past 10 years?
	Keeping things private is becoming a bit of a habit with the Secretary of State. We have been trying to get answers about national insurance numbers and this issue ever since it became clear, two months ago, that thousands of illegal workers were being cleared to work in the security industry. The written questions remain unanswered to this day. On 13 November last year, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) asked the Home Secretary about the issue during questions on the Security Industry Authority. She waffled and said almost nothing, telling us that sharing intelligence would be important in the future. It seems that the Secretary of State is not alone in wanting to keep us guessing about what is really going on.
	I believe that yesterday's admission represents the tip of the iceberg of what is really going on with the Department for Work and Pensions' management of the system for migrant workers coming to Britain. We now know with cast-iron certainty that at least 6,000 people, illegally in the UK, have been given national insurance numbers by the Government. Yet nearly two years ago, the Government promised us that in future no national insurance numbers would be issued to anyone who did not have a right to work in the United Kingdom.
	If the Government had done their job, those latest revelations should not have been possible. On 5 June 2006, Ministers told both Houses of Parliament:
	"Any individual applying for a NINO"—
	that is, a national insurance number—
	"...who does not have the right to work here legally will be refused one."
	They passed regulations that were supposed to enforce that. The guidance notes state clearly that an individual applying for a national insurance number because they are in employment or self-employment must provide a specific document proving that they have the right to work in the United Kingdom. That was nearly two years ago, but we now know that every single one of the illegal immigrants in the security industry who caused such controversy before Christmas had been issued with national insurance numbers. Even when the regulations were passed, the Government strongly implied that the problem was small in scale. They had managed to find only about 3,000 cases in which something was amiss. It is now clear that that was a hopeless underestimate; the figure is much higher.

Chris Grayling: I have never said that they are the same thing, but the Government's own statements show that they regard the issuing of a national insurance number as being linked directly to the right to work in the United Kingdom. They have clearly not managed the system properly given that, as we know as a matter of record from yesterday's revelations, national insurance numbers are being handed out to a large number of people who do not have a right to work in the UK. That is the point. Nearly 1 million people have received national insurance numbers: the question is how many of them really have a right to be working in the UK. We know that some of them do—for example, overseas students or dependants of people who do have permits to work here.
	Lest Members should have any doubts about this issue, let me give a couple of examples of why I sincerely believe that the 600,000 figure masks a significant number of people who should not be here. Take Ghana. Over the past three years, the Government have issued 755 work permits to people from Ghana, but over the same period they have issued more than 21,000 national insurance numbers to people from Ghana. Take Albania, with 110 work permits issued and more than 4,000 national insurance numbers issued. Try persuading me that all those numbers were issued under the normal— [ Interruption. ] The Minister for Borders and Immigration asks how many are students. Let me answer that question for him, because I have taken a look at the website of the Higher Education Statistics Agency, whose most recent figures show that a grand total of 235 Albanians are studying in the UK—hardly equivalent to 4,000.
	What do we know about the rest of those people? We have sought to do the right thing by probing the Government to find out who they really are. When my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere asked Ministers whether they could provide us with a breakdown of the gap between the number of work permits that they issue and the number of national insurance numbers that they hand out, their response—surprise, surprise—was that they did not have that information. So how do we take them seriously when they tell us that they know what is going on?
	Let me say what I think. I do not believe for a moment that all those national insurance numbers were issued to people who are legitimately in the United Kingdom. I have suspected for a while that the current system is simply out of control—that the Government are handing out national insurance numbers to people who have no right to be here, and that Ministers have told employers that the national insurance number system is something they can rely on when the opposite is the case.

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend is right because underlying the debate is a real human cost. Getting the system wrong has real consequences for people in communities up and down the country.
	If we could all see there was something wrong, why did the Secretary of State not see it? Let me ask him this question. When the security staff story first broke back in December, it was clear that there could be an issue with national insurance numbers. I have a copy of the application form here. It is quite clear, and it says that applicants are required to fill in all their details with a national insurance number. That is why we asked the questions, so why did he not answer? When did he first realise that something was amiss? Why was his Department still claiming that it did not know the answer as late as yesterday morning, when the Security Industry Authority was able to say what it knew? Why did it say that the answer was 100 per cent. when the Department was still trying to find out? Did he actually talk to it to find out what had happened, and what changes has he ordered to the national insurance number system since the matter occurred? Why has no statement been made to the House about what is clearly a problem in the Department?
	This is a matter of extreme importance, not for technical reasons related to our immigration system, but because of those nearly 5 million people stranded on out-of-work benefits. Not all of them can or will work again; those who cannot will rightly need the help of the state to support them. But very many of them can and they should be working again. It makes no sense to have millions of people coming to work here from overseas, or to be so lax with people coming to Britain illegally, while so many people are sitting at home doing nothing.
	I am not sure the Secretary of State has fully grasped the seriousness of that issue either. When we met at the Dispatch Box last week, I pressed him about the level of child poverty in Britain. The academic evidence is clear-cut. Children brought up in workless households are more likely to fail at school, more likely to be workless themselves and more likely to end up in trouble in later life. Britain today has a higher proportion of children living in workless households than any other country in Europe, including the poorest new entrants to the EU such as Romania and Latvia. The Secretary of State does not seem to know that because when I pressed him on the issue, he said he thought we were "above the average" in Europe. I suggest that he goes back and looks at the figures again. He should cut through the Government's rhetoric, and take a look at the real picture in Britain today, where child poverty is rising again, where young people cycle on and off the new deal without finding sustainable jobs, and where, in some parts of our community, as many as one in three children are being brought up in workless households.

Chris Grayling: I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker. The fact is that the Secretary of State is presiding over a Department that is focused on dealing with those issues, while at the same time it is giving national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants. That is not a record of which any Secretary of State of any Government should be proud.
	The truth is that the Government's record in managing the flow of people coming to work in Britain is lamentable. They do not know how many people are here. They do not know who is working. They do not know whether or not people have a right to work here, and they seem to be handing out national insurance numbers without question. And yet the Department overseeing all of this is run by a Secretary of State who, by his own admission, cannot add up. He said that he could not manage his own finances because of the pressures of work, but he still thought it was okay to take on the Labour deputy leader's job. He had lost control of not just the numbers in his campaign, but in his Department as well. And all while he was trying to run not one, but two Departments of State. It all appears to be getting a bit much for him.
	We know that the system he is overseeing is in a state of chaos. We know that handing national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants will undermine efforts to tackle deprivation and get people back into work. Will the Secretary of State tell the House why he believes that he is still the right man to do the job?

Peter Hain: I beg to move, To leave out from 'House' to the end of the Question, and to add instead thereof:
	"welcomes the new checks and controls the Government has introduced to reduce illegal working by foreign nationals, which include measures to prevent illegal immigrants being issued with national insurance numbers."
	I am very pleased indeed to be responding in this Opposition debate, and I am even more pleased having heard the speech of the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). Up to five minutes to four yesterday, the Opposition wanted to debate pensioner poverty today. Now they do not, and I can understand why. They treated pensioners appallingly when they were in power and now they have nothing to say to them. For our part, we will continue to work, speak and act for justice for pensioners.
	I welcome this debate, not least because it gives me the opportunity to explain to the hon. Gentleman—and he clearly needs a proper education on this—what national insurance numbers are for and what they are not for, because he does not appear to understand. In fact, when he reads  Hansard tomorrow, or online later today, I think he will be embarrassed by what he has just said. The hon. Gentleman makes accusations about national insurance numbers and compares them with work permits, but they are not the same. Total national insurance numbers issued to non-EU nationals and the number of work permits issued cannot be compared, which he tries to do.
	National insurance numbers cover categories of people who are not required to have work permits but are eligible for national insurance numbers, for example, overseas students, whom we welcome into our universities and who bring the fees that help to finance those universities, and the dependants of work permit holders—relatives who are given permission to come to the UK to join a family that already lives here legally. There will always be more national insurance numbers than population, as, for example, national insurance numbers for deceased persons remain on the system to ensure that their surviving dependants can get benefits based on the deceased's national insurance contributions, including the widow's pension. That would also have been the case before 1997, when our Government came to power.

John Penrose: I keep saying that I am a lot prettier than my hon. Friend.
	If someone approaches an employer saying that they are a British citizen, that they have no proof of it, but have a national insurance number, how is that employer to be sure that the person has a right to work in the UK?

David Davies: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way. If the Security Industry Authority and the Home Office, which has been found to be employing illegal cleaners, cannot determine who can and cannot legitimately work in this country, how on earth does he expect a small shopkeeper, a restaurant keeper or a small businessman to do so?

Peter Hain: Not for a moment.
	It is no good the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell fulminating about illegal working when he wants to deprive Britain of an essential weapon—compulsory ID cards for foreign nationals—to defeat it.
	Lest we forget, I shall detail some of the other measures that the Opposition have felt unable to support on this matter: fines for hauliers who attempt to smuggle illegal immigrants into the country to work illegally; limits to benefits for asylum seekers; measures to refuse asylum to convicted criminals sentenced to two years' imprisonment—so much for the high and mighty condemnations of the Government that we have heard this afternoon.
	We are now in the middle of the biggest ever shake-up of Britain's border security, intended to tackle these problems: we are introducing a single border force to guard our ports and airports with police-like powers for front-line staff; checking fingerprints before we issue a visa for anywhere in the world; counting foreign nationals in and out of the country; and introducing compulsory watch-list checks for all travellers before they land in Britain and, for high-risk countries, before planes take off. We are also introducing a new points system like that in Australia so that business can bring in legal migrants to work here legally as we need them.
	Conservative Members express "very great concern" on the issue of illegal immigration. They are concerned if they think they can get a vote or two out of it, but not concerned enough to do anything about it or to back those such as the Government who will. As has been shown graphically this afternoon, this is a contrived debate. What Channel 4 news ran last night, the Opposition re-heat today, which is a fine example of what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell does best—putting a crust on a soufflé.

Danny Alexander: I am grateful to the Secretary of State for what he has said. I will make one specific suggestion now. I think that the Department needs to find out as soon as possible when the national insurance numbers in the 6,653 cases that have been highlighted were allocated, and tell the House what proportions received their numbers before and after July 2006. I realise that the task might be labour or IT-intensive, but it is important to shed light on whether the existing checks work or not. I hope that the Minister will feel able to commit the Government to doing that.
	Clearly, national insurance numbers have been issued in the past to people who were not entitled to receive them because of their immigration status—in other words, because they were not entitled to be in the United Kingdom. I confess that I do not know what this would involve, but what steps is the Department taking to ensure that those numbers are revoked and removed from the system and people cannot continue to use them in a way that, while not in itself sufficient to gain them employment, is nevertheless part of the process of gaining employment and might, in some cases, lull employers into a false confidence that those with whom they were dealing had a legitimate right to work or indeed to claim benefit—a subject to which I shall return shortly?
	This is, of course, not a new problem. In 2005, serious concerns were raised with Her Majesty's Treasury about people claiming tax credits who, although not in the country legitimately, had national insurance numbers. It seems that in 2000 it was decided, perhaps by officials, that it was too costly to check immigration status before issuing national insurance numbers. In the light of the latest events, the basis and purpose of that decision must be questioned.
	We must ask what are the implications of these events. As was pointed out by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), they are linked to the problem of the number of foreign workers in the United Kingdom, and the ability to count people in and out. The Secretary of State announced back in November that the figures had been miscalculated, and that there were 1.1 million foreign workers in the UK rather than 700,000. The aspect of benefit fraud is also important. According to the DWP's website,
	"A National Insurance (NI) number is a personal number used: to record a person's NI contributions and credited contributions"
	and
	"because it is needed when claiming social security benefits".
	As was shown by a report published just before Christmas, nearly £2 billion is still being lost through fraud and error in the benefits system. That is a staggering figure with which I do not think anyone in the House can be satisfied. The most recent report showed that the amount of benefit being lost through both fraud and error had risen. While it is fair to say that in earlier years there was a steady decline in fraud, that seems to have stopped, and the amount of error is increasing. Given that national insurance numbers are necessary for the claiming of benefit—

Danny Alexander: I did not suggest that they were, as I think the record will make clear. Nevertheless, possession of a national insurance number is an essential starting point for a benefit claim. If the number has been obtained through the proper procedure, even if the person concerned is not entitled to it, that will allow the person to enter the process of claiming, although other information would have to be provided—in this instance, fraudulently—for the claim to be made. If, however, there is still a loophole, a problem, a mistake or incompetence in the system for the allocation of national insurance numbers, there are potential implications for the benefits system that need to be examined. I make no stronger claim than that, and I trust that the hon. Gentleman does not disagree with it.
	I could not agree with the tone of some of what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said about the nature of the problem of foreign workers. He was, of course, right to stress the need to ensure that the maximum number of British claimants of incapacity benefit, for instance, are given the skills and support that will enable them to return to work. That is a critical factor. It is also true that there must be strict rules governing which people from other countries are and are not entitled to work in this country. It would be wrong, however, for the tone of the debate to give the impression that the large number of workers in the United Kingdom who are from foreign countries, whether inside or outside the European Union, are not making a valuable and in some cases an essential contribution to our economy, our public services and so on.
	In my own constituency, a large number of citizens from other European countries—I have discussed this with the Minister for Borders and Immigration—are making an essential contribution to the economy of the highlands and islands. That is not to say that people should be entitled to work if they are here illegally, but we need to conduct these debates in measured tones and to make it clear that those people are welcome in this country and are doing essential work. Of course, the pattern of migration will change over time, and it is critical that we ensure that as many people as possible get off benefit and into work. My point is perhaps more about tone than anything else.

Stewart Hosie: I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman might amplify that point. It is not merely that Inverness is booming and that excellent work is being done in Aviemore by a large number of mainly youngsters from eastern and central Europe. In the past three years, the populations of Dundee and Glasgow have risen after decades of decline, and the population of Scotland has increased, when it was forecast to decline over the long term. By and large, the general experience, both for those coming in and the people already living here, has been a happy one.

Danny Alexander: I agree with much of what the hon. Gentleman said. I do not agree—but perhaps he was not making this point—that there is an equation between the two. We must work to get people off benefit and into work. He mentioned Glasgow and we could mention many other parts of the country, including my constituency. There are very good reasons to work extremely hard to address the issue. I have a lot of criticisms of the Government's approach to that matter, but they would probably be outwith the scope of the debate. Work is important not just for economic reasons but for reasons of the dignity and self-worth of the individuals themselves and the wider non-financial benefits of working. However, it is not a zero-sum gain. I am not saying that we need to get those on benefit into work, so that we can have fewer foreign workers; I think that we need both.

Danny Alexander: I think that we have said enough on that point. The Secretary of State is right and the point about how the debate is conducted is important.
	It is worth pointing out that problems with the administration of national insurance numbers have also occurred under previous Governments. For example, if it were not for the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), we might never have known about the failure of home responsibility protection. Because of problems in administration, no checks were made by the child benefit office to verify national insurance numbers until 1994. Women did not have to supply those details on the forms and it was not until May 2000 that it became compulsory for child benefit customers to do so. If it had not been for the work of my hon. Friend in highlighting that issue, many women would have been denied significant proportions of their pensions, because of the absence of proper checks on national insurance numbers. Such important matters must be got right, but at various times and at various levels, different Governments have made mistakes in the administration of the national insurance numbering system, and charges of incompetence could equally justifiably be levelled in both cases.
	This important issue must be addressed in a balanced manner. Above and beyond the short-term issue of the damage done to Secretary of State's political credibility by recent revelations—it is very dear to his heart but it is none the less short term—this is a long-term issue that needs to be resolved, whether by him or by whoever follows him, should that eventuality arise. The Government need to do much more to ensure that there is confidence in the system. I have suggested that some investigations at least need to be carried out. For there to be confidence in the system, competence is required, including from the Secretary of State and his ministerial team.

Greg Hands: I was under the impression that interventions, even from Ministers, should somehow relate to the context and content of the speech that is being made, Madam Deputy Speaker. I do not believe that I have mentioned anything about identity cards, and they are not on the Order Paper, so I find the whole thing rather peculiar.
	I want to continue dealing with the impact that these poor quality data can have on a local authority. As a result of adjustments to estimates of international migration, the population in my borough is estimated at 8,500 people fewer than the previous estimate for 2005—the same year in which the 9,310 foreign nationals registered for national insurance numbers. As a result, there has been a net loss to the borough of a huge amount of money in the calculation of local authority support grants and so on.
	The solutions for local authorities must lie in proper and robust population data, including, if not especially, on national insurance registration and on gateway authority funding for local authorities that are facing a big influx of migrants, whether legal or illegal. I want to make a few points on that particular controversy. I think that the Secretary of State was saying that that process is now very stringent when someone applies for a national insurance number, and, if I am not mistaken, he read out a series of hurdles that someone now has to jump over to get their number. I can only assume that the system has changed radically since his chief economist gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee in 2005, when he said that applicants are essentially issued with a national insurance number and that it was not about ascertaining whether someone is legally in the country or has the right to work, because they are given one anyway.
	Some 300,000 national insurance numbers are issued to foreign nationals annually. I was interested in a parliamentary answer given to my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). He asked how many fraudulent applications for national insurance numbers there had been in each of the past four years. The Minister responding said that the number of applications that had been refused in the previous year because there was a doubt about the identity of the individual was only 1,020. So 300,000 national insurance numbers were granted to foreign nationals and only 1,020 were refused across all categories. That seems to me a sign that the processes that the Secretary of State laid out may be all very well in theory, there is doubt about whether they are happening in practice. If they were, the refusal rate would necessarily be much higher than 0.33 per cent.
	The Secretary of State seemed to suggest that business was at fault. Businesses clearly have a role in ensuring that the people who work for them have the legal entitlement to do so, but it cannot be primarily the duty of businesses to determine that. In 2006, the CBI said:
	"Employers face real difficulties in vetting potential employees because of the sophistication of scams by illegal immigrants seeking work. The apparent ease with which National Insurance numbers can be obtained makes an already-complex situation even more complicated."
	The Secretary of State read out a huge list of hurdles that people supposedly have to get over to get a national insurance number. I question the practicality of employers, especially small employers, being able to vet all that documentation.
	My final point is the incredible delay by the DWP in checking the situation out. I understand that the Secretary of State has been otherwise involved on several other fronts in recent months, but surely he cannot have failed to notice that there has been an ongoing controversy in Parliament and in the media about foreign nationals working illegally in the UK. I have been given a chronology of all of the events since 12 July 2007, when the Home Secretary first saw a paper on the subject of illegal foreign nationals working in the Security Industry Authority. The chronology includes 18 different events, and bizarrely only the 18th—the publication by Channel 4 of its investigation last night—implies that the DWP at any point checked the facts of the case. I find that staggering, considering that the issue related to illegal foreign nationals.
	Let us contrast the situation in the UK with that in the US. Many of my constituents have worked at one point or another in the US and they know of the elaborate and laborious process that it uses to allocate social security numbers.

David Davies: When the Secretary of State was in his place, before he slipped off to do other things, he told us that the Government have put all sorts of hurdles in place to prevent people who should not have access to national insurance numbers from getting them. He listed those hurdles, and no doubt they will be very costly, too. However, he made the point early on that a national insurance number does not mean that one is entitled to work in this country and that employers therefore have a duty to undertake checks such as those that he is putting in place. He seems to think that employers should have another raft of checks to find out whether those with national insurance numbers are entitled to work. That is absolutely ridiculous.
	I have employed people in my life, and I assumed that if someone came along with a national insurance number, they were legitimately entitled to work. If we are being told is that that is not the case, I have learned something new today. The Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform must agree that many employers would feel the same if someone turned up with a national insurance number—the assumption would be that they had the right to work. If the Secretary of State meant that employers have to put checks in place, as a member of the Select Committee on Home Affairs I have heard that if they decide to run checks merely on non-EU nationals they might become the subject of a discrimination lawsuit. Presumably, employers will have to put in place a raft of checks that apply equally to someone from outside the EU and to someone with a full British passport. Perhaps the Minister can explain that in a little more detail.

Stewart Jackson: This may, perhaps, pre-empt you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but maybe the hon. Gentleman has had a reasonable lunch and has just ambled in for a little mild peroration for the benefit of the good burghers of Battersea, but the situation that we are debating has nothing to do with ID cards. He will have to ask the Whip for a better brief next time.
	This is the Government that gave us one-legged Romanian roofers, who cost the job—

Stewart Jackson: There is no empirical or academic evidence to support that view. That is the rather limp line taken by the Government—although not by Labour Back Benchers, since none have bothered to turn up. As we are talking about clear, unambiguous answers to questions, at the start of the debate my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) asked whether the DWP had given national insurance numbers to illegal immigrants. I hope that the Minister will answer that question in her closing remarks, as the Secretary of State failed to do so. I ask again: have the Government presided over the distribution of NI numbers to illegal immigrants?
	The present Minister for Children, Young People and Families used to be the Minister responsible for immigration. She lost that job due to the debacle over one-legged Romanian roofers, but this Government have also failed to deport almost 1,000 foreign prisoners, while the Home Office has employed illegal immigrants to guard the Prime Minister's car. We should not be surprised by that, as the memo leaked from the DWP in 2006 made it clear that it was official Government policy not to make any inquiries about the nationality status of people seeking NI numbers. That policy was attacked by the Labour peer Lord Grabiner as long ago as 2000. He made it clear that he considered what was happening to be a scandal, but the Government turned a blind eye and continued to do nothing about the problem.
	We should not be surprised either by the dodgy figures used by the Government when they predicted that 15,000 people from the eight EU accession countries would come to the UK from May 2004. That estimate was out by a factor of about 50, as the reality is that some 700,000 people from those countries have come here. That has had a commensurate impact on community cohesion, housing and jobs for low-paid and low-skilled workers, who resent such unprecedented immigration.
	I stand here to defend and speak for the people who are being pushed out of jobs, as no one in the Government will do so. Those people do not want to be resentful of incomers from outside their communities, but they do resent them because they see what is happening as a result of the Government's obvious mismanagement of the economy.
	Earlier, I mentioned the problem of criminal records. That is important, because giving NI numbers—and therefore de facto citizenship and nationality—to people from the EU who have serious criminal records is something that we need to know about. Again, the Government have turned a blind eye to the matter.
	Immigration has had a massive impact on local economies. My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) said that 5 per cent. of the population in his borough had received NI numbers. That is a fantastically high figure, but the experience has been similar in my constituency, where more than 8,500 people were given NI numbers in the first two years after May 2004. I am not even talking about the whole of the Peterborough city council area, either. My hon. Friend the Member for West Cambridgeshire (Mr. Vara) represents nine of the city council wards, but the figures that I have quoted refer only to what has happened in the other 15 wards covered by my constituency.
	Because keeping track of NI numbers is practically the only way to measure migration from the other EU countries, we have not been able to make proper plans for primary health care, primary education, housing and all the other elements that contribute to community cohesion. At the same time, however, good and decent young men in my constituency—asylum seekers from Darfur—are being returned to their possible deaths in Khartoum because the legal processes that they were using to fight to stay in this country and make a contribution here have been exhausted. They are being forced to eat bread and soup, to sleep on other people's sofas and to rely on the good offices of the Red Cross—an organisation for whose work in the Peterborough area I should like to take this opportunity to express my huge gratitude.
	The Government's failure to control immigration properly has given sustenance to the wicked and pernicious drivel that we hear from the British National party. We have heard that drivel already in Barking and Dagenham, for example, and we are beginning to hear it in the west midlands, Yorkshire and Lancashire as well. Such talk always emerges when there is a Labour Government in power. It emerged between 1974 and 1979, and it may be emerging again. We do not want that to happen in our towns and cities, and we can prevent it only if we control immigration properly.
	The irony is that, in many respects, a consensus exists. The Prime Minister's party political rhetoric and point-scoring has led him to use slogans such as "British jobs for British workers". He knew when he said it that it was illegal and that it could not be put into practice, but when we get beyond all that it is evident that there is a consensus about immigration in this country.
	The Conservative manifesto of 2001 supported the points system used in Australia. We were demonised, of course, by people like the Minister and her colleagues, and branded as closet racists, xenophobes and all the rest of it. My party also proposed the establishment of a border agency, and again we were told that we were xenophobes who wanted to keep out everyone who did not look or sound like us. Such claims were absolute nonsense, because we always made it clear that our proposal was based on what the country needed, irrespective of immigrants' creed, colour, religion or cultural background.
	What has happened since the Conservative party made its proposal? The Government have adopted our policy and established the Border and Immigration Agency. I was privileged to serve on the Committee considering the UK Borders Bill and I have reservations about the agency's effectiveness, but the Prime Minister and Ministers in the Home Office have made their commitment to it clear. We now have a points-based immigration system that is based on a policy filched from the Conservative party election manifestos of 2001 and 2005. Despite what the Government say, therefore, it is clear that there is some meeting of minds on this subject.
	This has been an important debate. The Opposition are committed to debating the issues surrounding pensioner poverty, but we also believe that the news and figures appearing in the media over the past few days mean that we had a duty to bring the Secretary of State and other DWP Ministers to the House to hold them to account for their actions. We also wanted to make the right hon. Gentleman accountable for his plans for the Department's operational direction over the next few years—if he is still in place.
	People in some parts of our country feel a sense of alienation and believe that they cannot trust any politician. They feel anger and resentment towards people who do not look and sound like they do, and that is wrong. Most people are decent. Wherever they come from, people come here to make a better life for themselves, and who are we to second-guess that? That applies even to those coming from the EU countries. If people are likely to earn five times what they could get in Estonia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, what is wrong with them sending some money back home to their families?
	It is not my place to argue about that, but we can plan our immigration system and the delivery of public services properly only if we know what the numbers are. For that, we need honesty and transparency, rather than obfuscation and duplicity. The Department could make a start by answering questions properly, and it should not respond by saying, "This information is not collected in this format", or "The information could be collected only at disproportionate cost."
	The Minister should work with us to defeat the extremists and to ensure that we have community cohesion in a civil society that we can be proud of, where everyone gets on well with each other. After all, the Conservative party is as opposed to the problems with Muslim extremism that have arisen in some parts of the country as she and the Government are, but working together requires a degree of honesty.
	I believe that the Minister must concede that the Government's management of immigration in the past few years has been lamentable. If she really thinks that things can change, she must honestly accept that the Government have given some NI numbers to illegal immigrants. If she is not willing to do that, she must give a full explanation of the eminent failure that we have seen over the past few years.
	I had hoped that more Labour Members would attend this debate, and I am sorry that they have not done so. This is a vital issue, and we will share with constituents around the country the results of the debate and the Government's disdain for the views expressed in this House. I hope that the Minister is able to show some humility and honesty when she winds up, as we need an immigration system that works. We need a system that will give this country a sound future and decent communities, in which people can work together irrespective of race, religion or country of origin.

James Clappison: I think we would all agree that this has been a good, important debate to which there were a number of good contributions—at least from Conservative Members. As my hon. Friends have pointed out, we have not had the opportunity to cast a critical eye over contributions from Labour Members. To be fair to the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander), who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, he made a number of important points and asked some legitimate questions—questions that we have already asked, and on concerns that we share. He also mentioned the tone of the debate. I agree it is important that we approach the issues in a measured way, using the proper tone, but there has to be debate about facts, evidence and policy, and talking about tone is not a substitute for that. However, those are perhaps matters for another day. Certainly, the points that the hon. Gentleman made today on national insurance numbers were apt.
	We have heard some excellent contributions from Conservative Members, who have shown the depth of their knowledge of both the subject and their constituencies. That is particularly true of my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands), who rightly drew attention to the huge number of people involved—896,000 people from outside the European Union have received national insurance numbers since 2004. He posed the question that naturally springs to mind: what has happened to the 600,000 of them who are not work permit holders? Have we accounted for them? I shall say more on that point later. His speech was particularly valuable in bringing the issue down to an individual and local level. He spoke with great knowledge and feeling about different elements of the issue and different people in his constituency.
	My hon. Friend spoke about the immense impact that the issue is having in his constituency. He said that 9,310 national insurance numbers have been issued to non-EU citizens in his constituency alone in one year. That is equivalent to 5.2 per cent. of the whole population of the borough. It inevitably follows that there must be important impacts on employment, services and infrastructure in his borough. He drew full attention to all those issues on behalf of his constituents and made some valuable points. He also mentioned a concern that is shared by a number of Conservative colleagues: the incredible delays in administration, which make all the problems so much worse.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth (David T.C. Davies) also spoke about the scale of the problem. He made an important connection between it and welfare policies—a connection that we have been keen to make throughout the debate. He spoke from the position of somebody who has been a small employer, who serves in the security industry as a special constable, and who is a member of the Home Affairs Committee. He made an important contribution to the debate, examining the issue from those perspectives. We do not hear often enough in the House the authentic voice of small employers, and my hon. Friend certainly put their case today.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr. Jackson) also made a valuable contribution. He reminded us of the many previous episodes of mismanagement on the part of the Government in respect of the immigration and asylum system and the work permit system. He recalled the work permit scrutiny fiasco which produced the resignation of one of the predecessors of the Minister for Borders and Immigration, the foreign prisoner scandal which in due course produced the resignation of a Home Secretary, and the failure to predict the numbers of legal migrants who would come from the A8 countries. Some of us can remember back to when the Government produced their original prediction of that. The figure produced was 13,000. Since then there has been controversy about the exact number of legal migrants, but the figure runs into hundreds of thousands. That is important because the national insurance numbers which are the subject of today's debate have been issued since 2004, when that huge and unprecedented influx of legal migrants began. The 896,000 national insurance numbers were issued over roughly the same period, since 2004, which gives us some indication of the huge pressures created. My hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough made that clear, drawing on experience in his constituency and speaking on behalf of his constituents and drawing attention to the real problems that the Government's policies are creating for his constituents.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) made some important points in a brief speech which showed fully his great knowledge of and competence in the subject, as a member of the Work and Pensions Committee. He spoke with impressive authority and knowledge of detail when he drew attention to the simple problem of competence which arises in this case.
	A number of questions remain, but I begin with a word of congratulation to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He will not have received many congratulations lately, but I offer him mine on the fact that there is such immense satisfaction with his performance that hardly any of his fellow Labour Members of Parliament have bothered to come to the Chamber to listen to the debate and none at all has bothered to speak. It is an achievement for the right hon. Gentleman that there is such a unanimous sense of satisfaction with his performance.
	I begin with the straightforward question that was asked of the right hon. Gentleman in a written question back on 14 November last year—how many of the non-EU nationals without the right to work, who were described by the Home Secretary in her statement to the House on 13 November, have been issued with a national insurance number? I have not had a reply to the original question, and I am not sure whether there has been an answer to it yet in the debate. I am grateful to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for his explanation of the delay in giving an answer. I understand from what he said that it is all to do with checking facts with the Border and Immigration Agency and the security industry. I thank him for that explanation.
	I would be grateful if the right hon. Gentleman could give me answers to the other questions that I asked the week before that one about national insurance numbers issued to UK and non-UK citizens over the relevant period. I will let him into a little secret, if I may. Those questions are the responsibility of his Department, and the Department is expected to answer questions asked of it. Nobody else can be responsible for the answers to those questions.
	We wait for the answer to how many of those 6,653 people have been issued with national insurance numbers. We have been given a detailed explanation by the Secretary of State of the new checks that were put in place by the Government as a result of the measures taken on 6 June, so I think we can take it as read that none of the 6,653 national insurance numbers was issued after the new system was put in place in June 2006. I look to the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform to tell me if that is wrong and if any of them were issued after 6 June. We are still waiting for an answer to the question how many NI numbers were issued in the first place.
	It is not hard to see why the Government are so reluctant to impart that information. After all, Ministers have been quick to lecture others about their responsibilities in respect of national insurance numbers. We heard a number of lectures today about what employers should and should not do and what is expected of them. The Home Secretary told us on 13 November when the matter first came to light. She said:
	"Employers are expected to assure themselves that their employees have permission to work".
	Employers, especially the small employers mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Monmouth, are entitled to ask what duties extend to the Government in respect of the same case. Surely it puts a different complexion on events if we learn that the self-same employees who should have been checked by the employers had been issued with national insurance numbers by the Government.

Stewart Jackson: I am listening to the strong case that my hon. Friend is making. He is a member of the Home Affairs Committee. We are told that there are many checks and balances to enable illegal immigrants to be weeded out, yet the Home Affairs Committee commented on page 113 of its report on immigration control:
	"It is not clear how individuals will prove to the DWP that they have the right to work in the UK, nor whether those who fail to prove it will be reported to the IND for investigation and possible enforcement action."
	Does my hon. Friend not think that that is a disgraceful situation after nine years of Labour Government?

Caroline Flint: I understand that the test will not be dropped. This country will continue, as and when appropriate, to welcome those with high skills to work here and share their experience and expertise.
	In relation to jobs, I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has given me the opportunity to share with the House some very important statistics that were released this morning, when I spent some considerable time on regional radio throughout the country, sharing with the UK—I was pleased to include Radio Scotland—the latest labour market statistics, which demonstrate that we have had the highest quarterly growth in the number of people in work since 1997. In the past three months, 175,000 more people have found a job, and—importantly, because this is not just about the numbers who get into work but matching that with the numbers who are coming off benefits—the figures on people claming jobseeker's allowance, incapacity benefit and income support are all going down. I was also pleased to share with the nation independent figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that the numbers claiming unemployment benefit fell for the 15th consecutive month to just over 807,000—the lowest figure for more than 30 years, and a fall of some 812,000, or more than 50 per cent., since 1997. For many Members, that is a world away from the unemployment statistics that hit 3 million-plus on jobseeker's allowance alone. When those numbers went down, they went straight on to incapacity benefit, which trebled between 1975 and the mid-1990s.
	The figures demonstrate that more people are in work and that many of them have come off benefits. That has happened over the past 10 years, complemented by people coming from overseas. If we can get it right, that is good for this country—for the British people who live here and the businesses that need workers.

Caroline Flint: No, I am not going to give way—[Hon. Members: "Give way!"] No, I am sorry. I am not going to give way because a lot of contributions have been made, some of which may relate to the point that the hon. Gentleman wants to make, and I want to respond to them.
	The hon. Member for Hammersmith and Fulham (Mr. Hands) made a point about the failure to get accurate figures for foreign nationals entering and leaving the UK. From 2008, we will start counting foreign nationals in and out of the country and we will introduce checks for all travellers before they land in Britain, and before the plane takes off in the case of high risk countries. We have established the Migration Impacts Forum, which gives the Government independent advice on the impact of migration. That, too, is important.
	The hon. Gentleman also commented on the number of national insurance numbers allocated in Hammersmith in 2006-07. The figure is 9,310 and represents numbers in the borough at a specific time. It does not necessarily remain static—some people may have moved elsewhere, including outside the UK. The 2006 data for the UK estimated gross in-flows of 591,000 migrants set against gross out-flows of 400,000.
	The hon. Gentleman also said that only around 1,000 people were refused national insurance numbers. There are separate tests. First, approximately 1,000 refusals, as cited in the parliamentary question to which he referred, were due to suspect identity documentation. More than 360 prosecutions took place in 2006-07. A further 12,602 refusals between April 2006 and November 2007 were for failing the identity test. On top of that, in the context of proof of right to work, a further 8,643 applications have been refused since July 2006, when the much stronger checks were implemented. That shows that our system is not out of control. It works.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	 Mr. Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	 That this House welcomes the new checks and controls the Government has introduced to reduce illegal working by foreign nationals, which include measures to prevent illegal immigrants being issued with National Insurance numbers.

Damian Green: I beg to move,
	That this House believes that human trafficking is the modern equivalent of the slave trade, and, while welcoming the Government's commitment to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings, regrets that this commitment has been delayed for more than a year since the Conservative Party first asked the Government to take this step, and will not come into effect during 2008; welcomes the forthcoming United Nations forum to fight human trafficking and urges the Government to take further immediate steps to help the victims of trafficking, including new measures to intercept traffickers and victims at our borders, better provision of refuge places, the use of telephone helplines, and a drive for better cooperation among national authorities within Europol and Eurojust, so that the United Kingdom can become one of the leading countries fighting human trafficking.
	It is good that we are having this debate 48 hours after the Home Secretary made the significant announcement that in the next 12 months the United Kingdom would ratify the European convention on action against trafficking, for a number of reasons. The first is that it was a cause of some national shame that 12 other countries had ratified the convention and we had failed to do so. The second and most important is that it may mean that the Government will stop merely talking a good game on action against trafficking, and will actually live up to their rhetoric. The third is that it shows that parliamentary opposition can have some effect in shaming a Government into doing what they know they ought to do.
	It was in January 2007 that we first urged the Government to sign the convention and to take a number of other actions against the appalling trade in human beings. In March they signed the convention, and made some other efforts against trafficking which we welcomed. By January this year, we thought that the process had become alarmingly slow, so two weeks ago we returned to our call for action, this time for ratification of the convention, and last week we decided to hold this debate. Two days ago, the Home Secretary said what we wanted to hear and we welcomed it, as we do in the motion. Better late than never is the appropriate phrase to describe the Government's performance on the matter.

Damian Green: A later part of my speech includes a tribute to the hon. Gentleman's work and that of the Joint Committee. I will bring it forward to this part, because that Committee has indeed done valuable work. In the absence of anyone else wishing to point out how much they are in favour of getting rid of human trafficking, which we all are, I think that we would all agree that this is the year for action. We need to see the British Government take a lead.
	In that regard, to return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), I hope that the debate on trafficking, which is a tough enough topic to deal with in itself, does not become absorbed into the wider debate about how to deal with prostitution. Not all prostitution involves trafficking, and not all trafficking involves prostitution. The debate about how to combat prostitution is important. I know that the Minister has been visiting Sweden to see how its policy is working. He will have heard views on both sides of the argument about the effects of criminalising all men who use prostitutes. Over the coming months, however, the debate, not least within Government, about the way forward on prostitution must not be allowed to delay further action on trafficking. Let us not delay action against one evil because Ministers cannot yet agree on how to tackle a related but different one.
	Sadly, it would be easy to fill this speech, and indeed the whole debate, with terrible, haunting stories of women and children who have been brutalised by people traffickers, duped, sold into slavery and repeatedly raped or violently exploited in other ways. As we all know, it is a disgusting scar on the modern world and it is getting bigger. Human trafficking is the fastest growing international crime. In terms of the money that it generates, it is up there with drugs and guns as the biggest international criminal activity. It is a global problem. According to the US State Department, up to 800,000 people are trafficked every year and trafficking generates about $9.5 billion in annual revenue, according to the FBI's calculations.
	The United Kingdom is sadly classified by the United Nations as a high-level destination. We are a desirable destination for people traffickers. A 2003 Home Office estimate is that the economic and social costs of trafficking in this country alone are about £1 billion, of which about £275 million constitutes the market for sexual exploitation—as it puts it. Inevitably, all such figures are fairly rough and ready.
	Many Members have rightly been exercised about the increasing number of women and girls being trafficked into this country, not only from eastern Europe, but from Africa and the far east. Again, the latest official figures are from 2003, when the Home Office thought that there were 4,000 victims of trafficking who had been brought to this country for prostitution. The most stark and horrifying statistic in this regard is that 10 years ago 15 per cent. of women working as prostitutes in this country were foreign, but that proportion has now completely reversed: it is 85 per cent. and only 15 per cent. are domestic. The Minister might have slightly more up-to-date figures, but those are the latest ones I have seen published. That is a terrible statistic.
	This issue is not only about prostitution; it is also about forced labour. We know that 60 per cent. of the victims of trafficking who have arrived here illegally are used in forced labour. A distinction is often made between people-smuggling and people-trafficking. Terrifyingly, it is a fact that many people who think they are in the former category end up in the latter category: they think they are being brought here because they want to get here illegally, but actually they are going to be exploited. Many of them pay £20,000 and more to agents to bring them here, and when they are here they are forced into debt bondage: they simply cannot earn enough money ever to pay off their debts, so they are free to be exploited by criminal gangs. That trade is every bit as terrible as the trade for prostitution.
	As well as acknowledging the good work of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, it is worth paying tribute to the various organisations that are involved in trying both directly to prevent the trade and to encourage our Government and Governments around the world to take effective action on it, notably the Stop the Traffik coalition, from which I imagine that many Members of all parties who are attending this debate have received information. It is doing an extremely good job, and it has made the point that next month there will be a United Nations forum on this subject in Vienna and that that is an important international conference where the global action that is clearly required to crack down on this global problem will be brought together.
	Instead of going through some of the dreadful horror stories, it will be constructive if I set out what we want the Government to do in the coming months and ask the Minister to explain why some of it has not been done already. I shall start with the ratification itself. I asked a question on 5 December about what changes to legislation were needed. The Minister replied that
	"we have identified a need for limited amendments to legislation and procedures, including the mechanisms for the support of victims of trafficking. The detail of the legislative changes is still subject to discussion within government".—[ Official Report, 5 December 2007; Vol. 468, c. 1220-21W.]
	As he has the House's attention today, perhaps he will tell us whether there is any need for primary legislative changes, or are simply secondary legislative changes required? If primary legislation is needed, why has the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill been allowed to go through? It became a Christmas tree set of measures in itself, with important additions at the last moment. Why was it not used as a vehicle for bringing in the changes that are needed? That would certainly have been welcomed in all parts of the House.
	I am genuinely bemused that these discussions are still going on inside Government. The Government signed the convention last March; we are now in January. When they signed it, they must have known what steps they needed to take to ratify it. It is extraordinary that these discussions are still going on inside Government some 10 months later. Clearly and rightly the Government have no objections to it in principle. They might have been reluctant to sign it if they thought it would in any way weaken our immigration controls. I imagine that, like me, the Minister has come to the conclusion that signing it would not weaken our very important immigration controls, so I hope to receive some explanation.

Vernon Coaker: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to the end of the Question and to add instead thereof:
	"condemns the trafficking of human beings as one of the most vile crimes to threaten our society; welcomes the Government's commitment to make the necessary legislative and procedural changes required to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings before the end of 2008; believes that ratification is an important milestone in the Government's concerted strategy to protect the victims of trafficking and bring to justice those who exploit them; notes that the UK Action Plan on Trafficking, published in March 2007 on the same day as the UK signed the Convention, comprehensively pulls together the work already under way across Government to tackle trafficking and creates a platform for future work; praises the work of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, established in March 2006 as the central point of expertise and operational co-ordination in tackling human trafficking; supports the valuable work done as part of nationwide police-led anti-trafficking operations, including Pentameter 1 and 2; and notes the £4.5 million of government funding provided over the last five years for victim protection under the Poppy scheme, which supports adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation.".
	I compliment the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) on the vast majority of what he said and, apart from the first couple of sentences, the constructive way in which he engaged with the subject—I thank him for that. I also thank all hon. Members who are present for the debate, particularly the significant number of parliamentarians who have had a huge input in taking the agenda forward. I thank not only my ministerial colleagues, and some members of my party who are in the Chamber—my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore), who is Chairman of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane), my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs and many others—but, in particular, I also thank the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), who has taken a particular interest in labour exploitation, and the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen), who has done a fantastic job with the all-party group on trafficking of women and children and through all his other work to take the agenda forward. Of course, I also thank hon. Members from the Liberal Democrat Benches.
	Of course, there will be differences between the parties about some of the things that I shall say and about some of the Government's policy decisions. However, we can and should be proud of the way in which we have tried to lead the debate as a Government and as a country. Regardless of the party politics, some hon. Members present today have been at conferences where representatives of other European countries have come to talk to us about how we are tackling the problem and to try to learn from us as we try to learn from them.
	As well as thanking Members of the House, I want to thank the stakeholders across the county: Amnesty International, ECPAT—or End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography And the Trafficking of children for sexual purposes—Stop the Traffik and all the other non-governmental and voluntary organisations. They, too, deserve a huge degree of credit for the way in which the debate has been taken forward.
	Trafficking is one of the vilest forms of crime and one of the vilest harms that threaten our society. It is unbelievable that 200 years after the abolition of slavery by the House of Commons, we are yet again debating slavery in 2008. Members from all parties have said that our Government should take the matter forward. That is what the people out there would not only expect of us but demand from us.

Vernon Coaker: We are considering it.
	As I said, ratification will be a significant milestone in the fight against the horrendous crime of trafficking, but it is only one stage in the ongoing battle against human trafficking. The Government have launched a series of offensives on different fronts as part of our wider anti-trafficking strategy. On 23 March 2007, the same day that we signed the convention, we signed the UK action plan on tackling human trafficking, which set out our national strategy and pulled together all the work under way across Government to combat the trafficking of adults and children domestically and internationally.
	The measure covers four key areas: enforcement, prevention, victim support and child trafficking. It also applies to trafficking for forced labour as well as other forms of human trafficking. The Government's commitment to enforcement is exemplified by the introduction of anti-trafficking laws that have resulted in a number of successful prosecutions. For example, since the commencement of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 on 1 May 2004, there have been 70 convictions for trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. However, those convictions do not represent the full extent of prosecution of traffickers, who are often charged with other serious offences, including rape, false imprisonment and serious assault.
	In April 2006 we launched the Serious Organised Crime Agency, one of whose top priorities is the fight against human trafficking. To complement that work, we established in October 2006 the UK Human Trafficking Centre, which is tackling all forms of human trafficking as part of its remit. The police- led multi-agency centre was instrumental recently in the success of Operation Glover, which rescued 33 female victims aged between 12 and 15 who are believed to have been trafficked internally within the UK, and prosecuted and convicted a number of individuals. The case highlights the fact that human trafficking is not always about the movement of victims across international borders, but can involve the movement of UK nationals within the UK.
	In 2006 the first major national anti-trafficking operation took place. Operation Pentameter 1 was a great success, resulting in the rescue of 88 victims, 12 of whom were children. As a result, 232 arrests were made and 134 people were charged with a variety of offences. Following this operation the UK Human Trafficking Centre was set up.
	Pentameter 2, launched by the Home Secretary in October 2007, is another catalyst designed to assist police forces in developing their response in this area. Back in June 2005, the then Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, South, wrote to chief constables setting out what forces' priorities should be in relation to organised crime. Organised immigration crime, including human trafficking, was the second priority after drugs. It will interest all hon. Members to know that we are discussing performance indicators as part of the new performance assessment framework for policing and community safety from April 2008. One of those indicators could relate to human trafficking.
	Work is under way with the Association of Chief Police Officers to improve the capability of the police and their partners to deliver effective protective services. The UK Human Trafficking Centre will assist in the development of law enforcement expertise and operational co-ordination, which will improve the proactive policing response.
	Intelligence from Pentameter 2 is already furthering our understanding of the nature and scale of trafficking across the UK. I do not want to spark a huge debate as I am trying to complete my speech within the next few minutes, but it may interest hon. Members to know that as part of Pentameter 2—for operational reasons which I understand, the police are reluctant to give too much information to us at present—according to Chief Constable Tim Brain who has done a fantastic job in this area, along with Chief Constable Grahame Maxwell, over 542 premises have so far been visited, a large percentage of which were residential, demonstrating the hidden nature of the crime. That is a significant change from some of what was happening in Pentameter 1. The number of arrests has already exceeded the number under Pentameter 1.
	Following the conclusion of Pentameter 2, the UKHTC in conjunction with SOCA will produce an updated strategic assessment—the hon. Member for Ashford asked about this—of the scale of human trafficking of adults and children in the UK. That will help us to improve on our previous research which, as he pointed out, indicated that there were 4,000 victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation in the UK in 2003, and it will help us to respond more accurately to the reality rather than the perception of the crime, and ensure that the counter-measures that we put in place are targeted and effective.
	Ratifying the Council of Europe convention will build on existing arrangements to provide a framework for minimum standards of support for all victims of trafficking. We are already doing considerable work. We have worked in partnership with the Poppy project to support adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation since 2003. We know that trafficking can have a devastating impact on a victim, and it is not enough simply to provide accommodation. That is why our UK action plan includes a range of measures to help identify and support victims and to try and prevent re-victimisation, which is crucial.
	A comprehensive victim strategy has been developed for Pentameter 2, in consultation with a range of stakeholders to ensure a consistent end-to-end approach. The campaign also provides an opportunity to develop local measures on trafficking. This includes scoping suitable service providers for victim support. The Poppy project, and the Tara project in Scotland, have been working with the UK Human Trafficking Centre and others to develop the capacity and expertise of other providers during the campaign.
	Following last year's campaign, the Salvation Army and the Medaille Trust established projects for victims. This year, partnerships are in place with a number of women's aid projects that cover areas such as Birmingham, Bradford, Sheffield, Leeds, Kirklees, Keele, Huddersfield and Harrogate. Is that enough? No, it is not. Is it an improvement on where we were? Yes it is, and we will make considerable progress. I think that the hon. Member for Ashford would agree that we have made a start and a move forward and have a positive statement to make to the House.
	The Government have also directed efforts towards combating child trafficking, one of the most abhorrent crimes of all. We have worked with the NSPCC.

Christopher Huhne: Liberal Democrats greatly welcome the debate and are pleased that the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) and his colleagues have secured it. I also pay tribute to the evident passion and conviction with which the Under-Secretary addressed the subject. There is clearly a substantial measure of agreement across the House on this issue.
	Human trafficking is a shocking and scandalous crime that is now estimated to be the third most lucrative activity for organised crime globally. It mainly involves the sex industry, but also agricultural work and, horrifyingly, trafficking of people who are used in the removal of organs. The trade begins in desperation in the developing world—Vietnam, China, Romania, central Asia—where the victims are often offered the vision of a better life and are then committed to pay back the cost of their travel. In effect, as the Under-Secretary pointed out, they are introduced into debt bondage. They are given only the most meagre amount of work to pay back the sums that they owe. They are isolated, lonely, afraid, unable to communicate because of their language, and unable even to assess their own predicament.
	Inevitably, there is enormous difficulty in terms of measurement—it is rather like the black economy—and we do not know how extensive the problem is. However, experts certainly believe that it is growing. The US Secretary of State's adviser, Dr. Laura Lederer, says that we are now on a par with the numbers enslaved in the 16th and 17th centuries. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime puts the figure slightly higher than the US estimates that the hon. Member for Ashford quoted—it says that 1 million people a year are involved, and possibly US$32 billion in revenue. This is very big business.
	We therefore very much welcome the Government's commitment to ratify the convention. According to the Council of Europe's website, 10 countries have ratified so far, so the convention will enter into force on 1 February this year. So far, however, I regret to say that the signatories are mainly poor countries. Although we will be the seventh European Union country to sign up and ratify, we will be only the third developed country to do so after Austria and Denmark. I very much hope that the Government will maintain the pressure on other EU member states to stop displacement; the Under-Secretary has already talked about the G6 group, including Poland. I also note that the European Union can, as a whole, ratify the convention. Given the Government's decision to do so and their interest in preventing activity in this country from being displaced elsewhere, and assuming and hoping that our measures will be effective, will Ministers commit to pressing the EU, as a bloc, to ratify the convention?
	The Government were clearly right, too, to criminalise trafficking in prostitution in 2003, but limited resources have been given to Operation Parameter, and perhaps there should be a clearer focus, internationally, on the big guys. Will the Minister tell us whether the Serious Organised Crime Agency has been effective, and what its role has been in pursuing this matter? There have been successful prosecutions, which is good news, but there are still big gaps. The gangmaster of the Morecambe bay cockle pickers was not prosecuted for trafficking, although he was quite rightly prosecuted for manslaughter. No successful prosecution has yet been brought for trafficking in forced labour.

Christopher Huhne: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point; the distinction between prosecution and conviction is crucial. The point that I was attempting to make was that there had been no successful convictions at all for trafficking in forced labour, and we must attempt to address that.
	I am also concerned about joined-up government. The police quite rightly treat trafficked sex workers as victims of crime, and as potential witnesses, while the immigration service is more likely to treat them as illegal entrants and potential deportees. How do Ministers intend to resolve the inherent conflicts in agencies' approach to this problem? There is another example of potential conflict. The 1998 rule giving visas to migrant domestic workers and allowing them the right to change employer was key. The employer had to moderate their behaviour to stop the potential loss of their employee—to prevent them from fleeing to another job. There was at least some incentive to moderate what would otherwise be autocratic and unacceptable behaviour. Indeed, the Minister's colleague Baroness Scotland noted on 26 March last year that the Government were
	"conscious that the change we brought in greatly benefited domestic workers in this situation."—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 26 March 2007; Vol. 690, c. 1436.]
	It seems to me that the changes limiting the ability of such visa applicants to work with only one employer are retrogressive.
	We particularly need a framework for dealing with children. Article 10 of the convention states:
	"As soon as an unaccompanied child is identified as a victim, each party"—
	signatory to the convention—
	"shall...provide for representation of the child by a legal guardian, organisation or authority which shall act in the best interests of the child."
	That is very much the point raised by the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) raised. The reality is that the current care system is creaking when dealing with such problems; it simply is not adequate. Child exploitation is on the rise. The figures that came out of the study that was commissioned in part by the Home Office show that children in 183 of the 330 identified cases went missing from the establishments where they were in care. The majority were over 16, but clearly some may have been abducted by the people who trafficked them, as someone said earlier, and others may have been afraid and simply fled. We need to do much more work on that front if we are to be sure of providing adequate care for those children who have been so brutalised and traumatised by their experience.
	Perhaps we should examine the Dutch system, which is holistic. I take on board the Under-Secretary's comments about potential problems with, for example, houses, but we need to be sure that we are providing security. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) also made that point. Security, whether in existing care homes or provided in another way, is essential.
	We must take care when placing responsibilities on local authorities—a favourite game of central Government, not least the Home Office—that resources are made available to ensure that responsibilities can be exercised properly. I hope that the pattern for other Home Office schemes, such as extending police community support officers and the subsequent reduction in funding, will not be followed.
	It is welcome that the Government intend to ratify the convention. I am sure that Ministers realise that it is a beginning, not an end to trying to tackle the problem seriously. Since the Under-Secretary has clearly done the work on the necessary changes in primary legislation, as he informed the House earlier, I hope that he can make a commitment to introducing those changes through amendments in the Lords to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. It was regrettable that they could not be tabled in the Commons, where some of my hon. Friends made that very point, but it is not too late to make the changes, assuming that the legal work has been done.
	The hard graft of finding practical ways to alleviate the suffering and protect the victims of trafficking is only beginning. We are considering an abhorrent crime, which is a scar on any civilised society. We must—I trust from the tenor of today's debate that we will—do all we can to end it as soon as is practically possible.

Andrew Dismore: The Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I chair, has taken a keen interest in the subject. That is shown by the number of our reports that are tagged for today's debate. We have achieved a great deal of consensus not only in the Committee but across parties on the vital subject. We greatly value our informal and regular contact with the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and I freely acknowledge his personal commitment to pushing for progress in his Department and across Government. His efforts have borne considerable fruit, although, as always, much remains to be done.
	Since our first report in October 2006, considerable progress has been made through the UK Human Trafficking Centre, the Government's action plan and their signing the convention last March, the start of Pentameter 2 last autumn and, of course, the additional support for victims, especially of sex trafficking—an appalling crime, whereby women are conned, coerced or kidnapped to face repeated rape and extreme violence.
	However, evidence for the scale of the problem remains woefully inadequate. In our first report, we recommended that research should be undertaken and published. We reiterated that in our report last autumn. The most up-to-date figures for sex trafficking date back to 2003, and they were considered inaccurate then. They are now way out of date. A scoping study was supposed to be published last June, but we were told that an inter-departmental ministerial group was "monitoring progress" and that Pentameter 2 would "improve our understanding". However, so far we have little in the way of hard facts and I hope that my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General will say what can be done to improve the position when she replies to the debate.
	We have no official statistics for child victims, whether they are in domestic servitude or imported for benefit fraud, to work in cannabis factories or in the catering trade, or for sex or forced marriage, which was mentioned earlier. We have no statistics on labour trafficking. Without details about scale, we cannot properly judge the efficacy of any response.
	Much has been made of the Council of Europe convention. We first recommended that it be signed and ratified in October 2006. We have repeatedly pressed for a timetable for ratification. We therefore greatly welcome the timetable that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced earlier this week, and the fact that we will ratify by the end of the calendar year.
	However, the convention comes into force on 1 February, with the 20th ratification from Cyprus. Given that we have not ratified, we cannot participate in the Committee of Parties, which is drawn from ratifying states and will make recommendations on the convention's implementation and appoint GRETA—the group of experts on action against trafficking, who are chosen from nationals of ratifying states. There will, therefore, be no UK membership of that group.
	The Government have been honest and correctly said that we should not ratify the convention until we can comply with it. However, that prompts the question: what remains to be done to come within the convention's terms? The real issue is not ratification per se, but ensuring that we do what the convention requires of us to combat this vile crime. The heart of the convention focuses on victims. The Committee's recommendation was that the protection of victims must be incorporated in our legislative framework, especially in immigration law. The Government say that they will consult widely on the issue and investigate all the options, but we do not think that any of that is necessary.
	It is clear what is needed in that respect. We suspect that the problem is to do with immigration and the unwillingness in certain circles to accept that the so-called pull factor argument is a myth. In that respect, I exonerate my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, who was distinctly uncomfortable when he was put up to advocate it when giving evidence to us. Indeed, he looked extremely sheepish indeed. It beggars belief that a woman would volunteer to be transported across continents, enslaved in a brothel and subjected to repeated rape and deprivation of liberty, with the threat and actuality of extreme violence, on the off-chance that she will beat our tight immigration system.
	The immigration issue is, I suspect, the sticking point. The convention requires a recovery and reflection period of 30 days—we on the Committee consider that inadequate and recommend three months—but it is not clear whether co-operation with the prosecuting authorities is a precondition for that. I suspect that the real issue is the renewable residency permit requirement. The key to that is the proper identification of victims. At the Council of Europe session on that last year, the Government set out a new process for the identification of victims, with the prime responsibility lying with the police and the ultimate decision resting with the Border and Immigration Agency, with the right for review at the request of a non-governmental organisation. However, that process is heavily dependent on effective training, so perhaps the Minister could say what progress has been made on that.
	We welcome the support that has been given to victims, but we are concerned about the future security of the system because we understand that the funding as it stands will last only until 2008. In particular, what support is being given to the devolved Administrations? The fact remains that there is no support for victims of labour trafficking, and there are significant concerns about the support for child victims. It is also interesting that the criminal injuries compensation scheme has at long last recognised trafficking as a crime and has started to award compensation.
	We welcome the decision to reconsider the UK's reservation to the UN convention on the rights of the child over immigration matters. The Government say that children are fully protected by existing law, so we cannot see what objection there could be to lifting the reservation, although the Under-Secretary indicated when he wrote to me about the matter that there would be no preconditions on that review.
	Labour trafficking remains a serious issue, particularly in relation to domestic servitude. As has been mentioned, the visa regime prevents a change of employer, meaning that people are hostages and become open to abuse. We were told last summer that the Government would consult publicly on the safeguards in the business visa arrangements. I should like to know what progress has been made on that and whether the Government will consider naming and shaming employers of trafficked labour, particularly in the agricultural and catering sectors, where there seems to have been very little progress indeed and certainly a lack of support for the victims.
	We in the Committee also recommended that the Government should publish an annual report to Parliament. The Government say that there will be an annual updating of the action plan and an annual report from the UK Human Trafficking Centre at the end of the financial year. That is all welcome but, given the cross-party interest that has been shown in the issue, it is important that the Government should pull those different strands together and provide the House with an annual report on the progress being made. That is the best way that we can monitor what is happening.
	The Joint Committee on Human Rights will continue to maintain a keen interest in the subject. We will continue to press the Government on the need for progress. I know that we are pushing against an open door with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, although I am not quite so sure that that is the case elsewhere. However, I assure him and the House that the issue is close to our hearts and that we will continue to pursue it until we see justice for the victims of trafficking.

Anthony Steen: rose—

Anthony Steen: I am grateful for the support of my hon. Friends and other hon. Members.
	We know that the Government have been active on the legislative front, and I think that they have done a good job. However, I shall point out some of the things that they have not done, and I hope that that will be constructive. However, it is not only the Government who have been active; the Joint Committee on Human Rights has also been very helpful and active. I should also like to note that there have also been three debates on trafficking in the past year.
	Back-Bench Members of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords, of all parties, were particularly active in the establishment of the all-party group on trafficking of women and children—of which I am Chairman—on 9 July 2006. That group does not just meet the bigwigs; it has also got its hands dirty down at the rock face. It has met African child victims of trafficking, eastern Europeans, Vietnamese trafficked children involved with cannabis factories and, most recently, Roma children on the streets of London. That group has tabled more than 100 oral and written parliamentary questions, which have stimulated further Government action. My thanks go to all the officers involved. My hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) is the astute treasurer of the group, and it has other distinguished members here and in the other place.
	The Government's major problem is their inability to provide accurate figures on anything to do with human trafficking. The most reliable figures came from Operation Pentameter 1, which are very modest, and we have not had the results from Operation Pentameter 2 yet, so we have no idea of the scale of human trafficking. We talk with great emotion about it, but we have no idea of its scale. The Government are appallingly bad at providing information. In answer to a written question from the hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran), the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker) said:
	"Data on the numbers of children and unaccompanied minors trafficked into the UK for each year since 2000 are not centrally recorded."—[ Official Report, 12 December 2006; Vol. 454, c. 1053W.]
	Nobody has any idea what the numbers are.
	Human trafficking has not only attracted a huge official infrastructure; it also has a huge vocabulary. The definition of "human trafficking" is not clear. Sex trafficking gets endless newspaper coverage in the tabloids, but confusion still exists between sex trafficking and prostitution. Human trafficking involves not only sexual exploitation but exploitation of labour such as domestic servitude, forced labour, begging and benefit fraud. It does not only involve women; it also involves men, including young men, and young children. Children under 10—which means they have no criminal liability—are being brought over to Britain by their extended family, having been trained in eastern Europe by people like Fagin in "Oliver Twist". They are forced to work in a range of criminal activities such as shoplifting, theft and automated teller machine—ATM—fraud. A talented under-10-year-old can earn between £50,000 and £100,000 a year for the gangs that they work for.
	The inability of this country to handle this problem is well illustrated by my experience on the beat on Oxford street as part of the police service parliamentary scheme. We apprehended a young Romanian girl at Marble Arch underground station. We believe that there were other children there, but they disappeared very quickly when we arrived. She refused to co-operate or to tell us who she was, where she lived or how old she was. The police officers took her to Marylebone police station as a place of safety. She had no money on her, only a return underground ticket. She refused to speak English, although she attended a school here and could speak the language. An interpreter was called for, at public expense. On searching her, she was found to have shoplifted goods on her, but their value was so small—under £20—that the police did not prosecute her. She had to be released from police custody and the social services in Haringey—which is where she said that she lived—said that they could not look after her. She is one of the many children from eastern Europe trafficked by gangs to work on the streets. Oxford street is full of such children. How are we going to deal with this?
	Will the Minister reconsider all the cases in the past few years in which children have been prosecuted and criminalised for theft or for cannabis cultivation, in the light of the new Crown Prosecution Service guidance, which states that they should be treated as victims of trafficking, not as criminals? Will he confirm that no such children who have been apprehended and prosecuted in this way are in prison? I believe that such children are being wrongly criminalised.
	A further problem with trafficked children is that they often go missing from social services care within 24 hours, and often within three hours. The ECPAT report "Missing Out", produced in 2007, revealed that in three local authority areas, of the 80 reported cases of known or suspected child victims of trafficking, 48 had gone missing from social services care. They go in one door and come out of the other. The Government report—I think that it was a Serious and Organised Crime Agency report—produced in June 2007 revealed that, of the 330 supposed victims of child trafficking, 183 had gone missing without trace.
	In answer to my question of 30 October 2007, the Home Secretary confirmed that in West Sussex, which covers the Gatwick airport complex, 50 children from abroad went missing from care between 2004 and 2006. In Hillingdon, which contains Heathrow, 74 children were reported missing in 2006 alone. The reason why children disappear from care is that their traffickers are the only people they know in this country—the children do not speak our language—and the only people they can rely on. They have been brainwashed not to trust anybody in authority, let alone the social services or the police.
	How can we start to help such children out of their miserable existence and to make them a priority? The problem is compounded by the diversionary activity of numerous officials who attend conferences and meetings all over the world—with upwards of 600 delegates, including lawyers, experts, officials and diplomats. Those conferences cost millions of pounds of public money, as the delegates travel first class, but those officials talk rather than focus on the real problems. Such money would be far better used to fund refuges, which often barely scrape by, to provide safe havens for trafficked children. Many refuges in the EU do not receive public funding. The POPPY project is the only refuge in the UK to receive a Government grant, while the position of east European countries' refuges is particularly dire. Why does the EU not help them? While diplomats munch in style, the people at the grass roots and the victims remain penniless.
	The Government must start to collect reliable data and statistics on trafficking in the UK. They keep promising, but they cannot deliver. With the police powerless to act against child trafficking of the under-10s and with human trafficking not being a police performance indicator, with social services losing children and with the immigration services having little expertise to identify victims and being unable to stop EU passport holders, the situation is now desperate.
	According to the former Minister for Women and Equality, the hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Meg Munn):
	"We are leading Europe on providing for victims and ensuring that people are recognised at ports."
	—[ Official Report, 22 February 2007; Vol. 457, c. 404.]
	That is just not true. As we conclude the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, we have a new chapter and a new form of slavery right on our doorstep. History is repeating itself and we have not learned the lessons.

John Austin: I start my speech where the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) finished his by drawing that comparison between the current horrendous slavery that we face today and that of the past. According to the International Labour Organisation, the estimated minimum number of persons exploited as a result of trafficking at a given time is approaching 2.5 million—an estimate made in 2005—but many hon. Members believe that the real figure today is much higher.
	As my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) said earlier, most people are trafficked for sexual exploitation, but he also referred to economic exploitation, and some people are trafficked for other reasons. There is also now the additional horrendous crime of trafficking in humans for organ donation. As other hon. Members have noted, trafficking in human beings is now the third most profitable criminal activity in the world after illegal drugs and arms trafficking.
	We are debating today a Council of Europe convention on trafficking. Like other hon. Members, I have served on the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which comprises national delegations from 47 European parliaments. I have recently been elected vice-chair of the Assembly's sub-committee on trafficking in human beings, whose aim is to campaign to promote the widest possible signature and ratification of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings, so that it can come into force not only at the earliest opportunity, but with the widest possible ratification.
	We are pleased to note that the convention will enter into force on 1 February, following the 10th ratification by Cyprus. However, entry into force is not an end in itself. To be successful, it must enter into effect in all the member states of greater Europe and in other parts of the world, providing a global response to a global problem. The wider the ratification, the better the protection for victims, as the convention can reach its full potential only when it is ratified by all the countries of Europe and beyond.
	To help parliamentarians and people who want to promote the widest ratification of the convention, the sub-committee has drawn up a handbook for parliamentarians, which I commend to Members. In the wider sphere, the Inter-Parliamentary Union is contemplating drawing up a worldwide handbook. I am pleased to note that my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, with his great knowledge and expertise, will represent the British group of the IPU at a conference in Vienna next month on drawing up that handbook.
	The convention can make a genuine difference, not only to prevention but to victims of this crime. Some have questioned the need for another convention, saying that there are already laws and international agreements. It is true that we have the United Nations protocol—the Palermo protocol—and the convention against transnational organised crime to prevent and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children. We also have the European Union directive of 29 April 2004 on the residence permit issued to third-country national victims of trafficking, or to third-country nationals who have been the subject of an action to facilitate illegal migration and who co-operate with the competent authorities. We have the EU Council framework decision of 19 July 2002 on combating trafficking in human beings, and we have the action plan from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to combat trafficking in human beings. So why do we need a new convention?
	We need a new convention simply because the existing international texts either are not sufficiently binding or take account of just one aspect of the problem. The geographical setting of the Council of Europe enables countries of origin, transit and destination to agree on a common binding policy against trafficking. The main reason we need this convention, however, is that none of the aforementioned legal instruments focus on victims of trafficking. The Council of Europe convention is the first international instrument to focus on the victims, and that is its added value. One of the primary concerns of the Council of Europe is to safeguard and protect human rights, and trafficking in human beings directly undermines the values on which the Council is based.
	Other Members have referred to the Government's slowness to sign the convention. I think that the arguments about the dangers to our immigration policy—the "pull factor"—were spurious, and that the Joint Committee on Human Rights was correct to say
	"It is not credible to suggest that a woman would voluntarily submit to indeterminate sexual slavery of the most brutal kind for the purpose of obtaining UK residency."
	I am pleased to observe the progress that has been made. It is true that the pressure to persuade the Government to sign was exerted on a cross-party basis, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Totnes for not just his knowledge of the situation but his determination. I also pay tribute to members of the Council of Europe delegation across the parties: to my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Chris McCafferty), and to the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway), who is no longer present, and the Baroness Knight of Collingtree. There has been a cross-party consensus on the issue, and I think that some of our debates on it have shown Parliament at its best. Parliamentarians have worked together to achieve a common goal.
	The features of the convention that are important and illustrate why we should ratify it include compulsory assistance measures and a "recovery and reflection" period for victims of trafficking, the possibility of delivering residence permits to victims not only on the basis of co-operation with law enforcement authorities but on humanitarian and human rights grounds, a non-punishment clause for victims of trafficking, a strengthened international co-operation scheme and the independent monitoring system, GRETA, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon referred.
	My hon. Friend also expressed one of my own concerns. The Ministers who are contracting parties to the convention will determine its procedures, the appointment procedures for the members of GRETA and the way in which they will work. If we have not yet ratified the convention by the time those discussions take place, what input will we have, and what consultation will we have with non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders to ensure GRETA's independence?
	Finally, let me raise two issues that others have mentioned. Both my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon and the hon. Member for Totnes have referred to the disappeared children on other occasions. In an earlier debate, the hon. Member for Totnes spoke of the international activity over one child who had tragically disappeared, and the media speculation and coverage of that one child, and contrasted that with the amount that we read in the national press about children who have gone missing from care. There is also the issue of unaccompanied minors who disappear. Do we know where they are, and do we know how many may have disappeared into the sex trade in Italy? We are becoming not only a country of destination, but a country of transit. That is why we need ratification, and we need it early. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister wishes to see that done with minimum delay.
	I welcome the guidance that the Government have produced and the statement that the Home Secretary has made this week. I think that there is a determination in the House and on the part of the Government. I hope that the motion will not need to be subject to a vote this evening.

Keith Vaz: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Devon (Mr. Swire), and to have been listening to such an important debate with so many excellent contributions, such as those from the Minister and the hon. Members for Ashford (Damian Green) and for Eastleigh (Chris Huhne). I was going to say that we cannot put a cigarette paper between the Front-Bench positions, but we are not allowed to talk about cigarettes any longer, of course.
	All Members understand the seriousness of the issue under discussion. As we have heard, the phrase "human trafficking" covers a wide variety of behaviour, ranging from the experiences of the illegal immigrants from China who worked as cockle pickers at Morecambe bay to the abused women, many from within the European Union, who are tricked into working in the sex industry in the United Kingdom. Although recent operations in our country have focused on the sex trade, as the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) pointed out in his eloquent speech, there are other issues such as bonded labour in areas such as domestic service and the restaurant trade that involve even more people, so the effects might be even wider than the experts present today believe.
	The hon. Member for East Devon quoted State Department figures. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 1 million people are trafficked across borders each year, and the trade generates $32 billion a year worldwide, making it the third biggest earner for organised crime gangs after illegal drugs and arms trafficking. Although estimates vary, it is agreed that thousands of people are trafficked into our country every year. I take on board the point made by Members that it is important that we have up-to-date figures from the Government on how many people are involved. Victims of trafficking are sold from gang to gang and are moved across the UK and between the UK and other EU member states by the people who seek to exploit them, which make the detection of these people very difficult indeed.
	I, like other hon. Members, warmly welcome the Government's decision, announced by the Home Secretary yesterday and reinforced by the Minister today, to ratify the European convention on human trafficking. Obviously, we all hope that that happens as quickly as possible, although the timetable given suggests that it should happen by the end of the year.
	I also welcome the effects of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which this Government introduced. Some £109,328 has been seized by my local Leicestershire police force as a result of the operation of that legislation. I congratulate the Home Office on other significant measures, such as the creation of the UK human trafficking centre in 2006 to ensure that the response of our various police forces is co-ordinated.
	Yesterday, I met Kate Allen from Amnesty International. Although she praised what the Government have done, she raised a number of issues concerning the identification of trafficking victims and touched on many of the points raised by hon. Members on both sides of the House about the immigration implications for those who are left in this country.
	The Home Affairs Committee has considered a number of those aspects. It has examined aspects of immigration, asylum law and human trafficking. I am pleased to tell the House that we decided at our previous meeting to initiate a full inquiry into human trafficking, whereby the Committee will try to establish the scale and type of human trafficking and the way in which investigations can identify the victims, and make recommendations and suggestions to the Government.
	The inquiry will almost certainly examine the issue of international co-operation with other EU member states and with the new transit countries, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Croatia. We hope, of course, to take evidence from the Minister. I am pleased to say that we agreed to ask the hon. Member for Totnes to give evidence to help us examine how we can obtain good information. As other hon. Members have done today, I bend my knee to his vast experience on this issue.
	The inquiry will hear from the Border and Immigration Agency and the Serious Organised Crime Agency. We will almost certainly visit a number of EU and other countries. I am not sure that we will follow the Minister around Europe, but I know that Ukraine and Moldova, and possibly Lithuania or Poland, have been mentioned as places to visit. We are, of course, the Home Affairs Committee, so we do not intend to spend too much time abroad, but it is important to examine the source countries to ensure that we are able to track what is happening.
	I am certain that the inquiry will be thorough and will go a long way in helping the Government to take the right steps forward, in eradicating this terrible problem and in trying to deal with the far-reaching problem of organised crime in this area. These women and children often come to Britain in the hope of a better life, and it is this House's duty, as reflected in the comments made by hon. Members on both sides of the House, to ensure that that is exactly what they get. They must not be exploited in the way that they have been in the past.

Denis MacShane: In the spirit of bipartisanship, I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) as well as many other colleagues. In January 2006, I had the pleasure of publishing an article in  The Daily Telegraph to urge the signature and ratification of the convention on action against trafficking. A year later, the shadow Home Secretary, the hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green), came on board. The campaign was already well under way thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr. Dismore) and, in particular, the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) and his all-party group. They all raised the issue repeatedly in oral questions, Home Office questions and directly with the Prime Minister.
	A year ago, I received a letter from the then Prime Minister. He said that signing the Council of Europe convention would
	"send a strong signal that as well as commemorating the abolition of slavery, we are also taking action to eradicate modern forms of slavery and discrimination, such as human trafficking."
	Two years after we began the campaign, the fact that we have signed and ratified the convention is cause for modest parliamentary celebration. It shows that working in Europe and accepting some derogation of our sovereignty in agreeing to change our laws at the behest of a European agency is something that all parties can support.
	I should like to take this opportunity to join others in thanking Ministers—especially my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Coaker), and my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, as well as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing—for showing leadership and courage in facing down objections from Whitehall officials on this measure. No one should underestimate how far we have come in two years, or the extent to which political leadership and parliamentary pressure have changed the story.
	I want to focus on the problem of the young women, many of them under 18 years of age, who are trafficked to work as prostitutes in Britain. I and other hon. Members have raised this matter in the House, usually to the scorn and sniggers of the sketch-writers and commentators—the lads with the laptops, so to speak. They find that any threat to what they consider to be men's inalienable right to buy sex from women, even when they are forced, beaten, trafficked or trapped into prostitution, is something that simply has to be dismissed.
	I hope that the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) will not take it awry when I say that I was dismayed to hear his contribution to last Sunday's "The World This Weekend" programme. He attacked those of us who want to tackle the demand side of sex-slave prostitution for being engaged on some sort of moral campaign.

Denis MacShane: Voltaire defined hypocrisy as the compliment that vice pays to virtue, and never was that more accurate than in the case of that south Wales newspaper.
	I am delighted to see that my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House has taken her place on the Front Bench, along with my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House. My right hon. Friend has taken a lot of unfair criticism since she very bravely raised this matter on the "Today" programme just before Christmas, but this is a debate whose time has come. It will not be easy, but the discussion has to begin.

Denis MacShane: If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I really cannot, as an eight-minute limit has been imposed on speeches. I am sure that he will have other chances to make points in the weeks and months ahead.
	What are the figures? I confess that no one can supply a fully accurate figure for the number of women trafficked into Britain for sexual slavery purposes. By definition, however, people being trafficked in and out of the UK sex-slave trade are not going to queue up at a border control to announce their arrival.
	On 19 October 2005, that fine newspaper the  Daily Mirror carried the headline "25,000 Sex Slaves on The Streets of Britain". I was once a  Daily Mirror reporter, so I trust the report that appeared beneath, which stated:
	"The Home Office believes between 2,000 and 6,000 women are brought in each year. Many are made to have sex with up to 30 men a day. Police say there could even be up to 50,000 women from every continent working in most cities."
	I do not know whether those figures are right; I am quoting the  Daily Mirror citing the Home Office two years ago.
	The rather ludicrous claim is advanced that because the number of prosecutions and convictions for trafficking has been low, and because the recorded number of foreign nationals detained following raids on brothels and massage parlours is low, there is not really a problem. That argument has been advanced not in this House but by a huge number of people commenting after the interview given by my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the House. It is like arguing that as the number of rape convictions is low, there are not many rapes in Britain.
	The defenders of men's right to have sex when they like, as often as they like, in any manner they like, with any teenage girl they like—those penetrating columnists with their defence of unlimited male penetration—need to examine the statistics with more care. The Council of Europe and many other international agencies—the UN, the International Labour Organisation, the International Organisation for Migration and the OSCE—as well as national Governments and non-governmental organisations, have tried to establish the true figures.
	The ILO, to which I am grateful for the material that it sent me yesterday, reckons that there are 2.45 million victims of trafficking. The US Government estimate that 80 per cent. of trafficking victims are female, and that 70 per cent. of them are trafficked for sexual exploitation, meaning that up to 1,658,000 women are trafficked each year for sexual purposes, of whom up to 225,000 are trafficked into industrial countries such as the UK. The Dutch reckon that there are about 3,500 victims of sex trafficking in their country, and the US Government believe that up to 17,500 women are trafficked into the USA each year for sex purposes, notably to provide internet porn for the world's masturbators.
	The ILO has estimated the profits per victim of sex slave trafficking at between $60,000 and $70,000 a year. An extra 40,000 prostitutes were said to have been imported into Germany just to service World cup fans in 2006; I am not sure whether English demand dried up after our boys' heroic performance. There will not be a problem, of course, for English fans at the next World cup.
	Those are some of the figures that we must consider. I put them on the record because I hope that they will balance the view that there is not really much of a problem and that the sex-slave industry is just a happy business of consenting adults exchanging money for services rendered. There may be some contented belles de jour or happy hookers, but every survey shows that most prostitutes and sex slaves would quit the industry if they were not obliged to service men to pay for a drugs habit or debts or, in the case of foreign women, if they were not kept in fear by brutal pimps. That is why a number of us on both sides of the Chamber have raised the issue of the demand side of the question of ever-increasing prostitution.
	In signing and ratifying the convention the Government have done well, but as long as there is an incessant demand for paid-for sex, trafficking will increase to supply it. I know that calling for some control of demand brings down the wrath of the media establishment; I hope that the Opposition Member who winds up will address that point and say whether they support the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire and the Leader of the House. Ministers have been to Sweden to see the impact of putting the responsibility on men rather than women for criminal activity in the sex-slave industry, and the House will listen to their reports with interest.
	A national debate has begun. I know that the position that I am defending is unpopular; it is attacked by much of the establishment media. Making men responsible and accountable for their actions is the best way to slow down and turn back the rising tide of sex slavery and trafficking. I welcome the ratification. I do not think that there is any need for the House to press the motion to a Division. I note the references in the Opposition motion to Europol and Eurojust, but as the hon. Member for Totnes (Mr. Steen) said, Europol cannot agree even on common statistics. Frankly, we need more European co-operation on the matter. We need a European bureau of investigation to tackle trafficking. That would mean co-operating fully in Europe. I just point out to Conservative Members where their arguments may take them.

Ann McKechin: This debate has understandably concentrated on the enforcement in the UK of the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings. However, I should like to consider the underlying causes of human trafficking.
	Human trafficking emerges from poverty, conflict and bad governance. The world is facing an unprecedented rise in population, and with that has come increased urbanisation of the poor and marginalised. Underpinning that is the problem of unemployment. Current figures estimate that about 185 million people are officially registered as unemployed. However, the International Labour Organisation estimates that if we also take into account the under-employed and working poor, the figure is about 1.5 billion people—that is, 30 per cent. of the working-age population of the world. Nearly half of them are under 24 years of age, although that age group represents only one quarter of the working-age population.
	The 2007 edition of the World Bank's world development report reveals that in the next decade the world will see the largest-ever proportion of youth population in its history. There are 1.5 billion people in the world aged between 12 and 24, and 1.3 billion live in developing countries. Countries with the highest incidence of poverty are almost all in eastern and western Africa. We have seen the human suffering and consequences of the desperate scenes conveyed to us by the media in the past few years. Such scenes have come from the coast of Tenerife, from Malta, which has been overrun at times by people coming across by sea, and from the gulf of Aden, where people go to reach Yemen and go onwards to the west. Against that backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the trafficking of humans has become the fastest-growing international crime, as has been mentioned today.
	Human trafficking does not happen only within our own borders; it is a growing problem in developing countries. The International Development Committee, of which I am a member, visited Ethiopia last year. We visited a local organisation that carried out a good deal of work to protect young children from poor, rural areas who had been sent to towns and cities in the hope of a better life. However, those children had often ended up as mere chattels.
	Child labour and bonded labour are prevalent in many parts of Africa and Asia. It is estimated that 20 million people are trapped in bonded labour, domestic slavery and trafficking, the vast majority of whom are women or children. We must address the rights of children and women in particular if we are to change the culture that offers tacit support for such forms of bonded labour and trafficking. It is interesting to note that last year there was a TV programme in China that highlighted people being snatched from their rural communities to be used as slave labour in neighbouring areas. That prompted a massive response in China, as it was the first time that there had been a public acknowledgement of the problem and its scale, and it resulted in thousands of people coming forward to state the extent of the abuse in their own communities.
	For the world's youth, we need to provide the opportunity to obtain decent work, either at home or through properly organised and legitimate migration. That will require increased co-operation and harmonisation of policies and programmes if we are to maximise its success. As has rightly been stated, we need co-operation right across Europe and outside Europe if we are to have a good alignment in our policies to curb trafficking here and in the developing world.
	The World Bank report recommends that a framework of policies is required to give young people expanding opportunities and the ability to improve their personal capabilities, and thus their income levels, but we also need to provide opportunities for them to have an effective voice in their communities and in public life. The ILO has called for global action to tackle the decent work deficit. Decent work is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for families, as well as allowing people to express their concerns and to organise. If we had that throughout the world, we would not have the problem of human trafficking that we see on our streets today.
	As levels of wealth in the world have increased enormously over the past 30 years, the share of that wealth that is represented as income has decreased consistently. We cannot shy away from the conclusion that the tragedy of human trafficking is at least in part a consequence of insufficient attention to creating more work through greater investment in job-intensive industries. While the service sector has produced many new jobs in recent years, the agricultural sector has been largely static. Yet the demand for food globally is increasing at a significant rate, and over the past five years demand has been higher than supply. Not only in our development assistance programmes but in global macro-economic policy, we need to do much more to foster greater investment in creating jobs. I hope that the UN summit in Vienna in the next few weeks will try to deal with some of those issues and give them greater priority.
	The Minister referred to the TARA—trafficking awareness-raising alliance— project, which runs in Scotland and is based in Glasgow. I commend the successful collaboration that has been taking place, particularly through the good offices of Glasgow city council and Home Office departments based in Glasgow and working with the Scottish Executive. The police have pointed to the continued problem of getting women to speak to the authorities. It is not surprising that they feel damaged and mistrustful of authority, so an extension of the reflection period should be seriously considered.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb), my colleagues on the International Development Committee, rightly stated the need to address the domestic sex industry, which is fuelling demand in relation to sex trafficking. The Minister may be aware that new laws recently came into force in Scotland under the Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act 2007, which specifically criminalises kerb crawling. To date, 40 men have been charged with that offence. I welcome the public campaign that was launched this week in Scotland, but more needs to be done. I hope that today's debate will lead to a further debate on prostitution-related issues throughout the United Kingdom.

Bob Spink: Would my hon. Friend accept that the vast majority of women involved in the sex trade, particularly the young ones, are victims of the trade?

Peter Bone: Indeed, they are victims.
	When I first got to know about this issue, I talked to Northamptonshire police, which confirmed that it was a real problem in our area, just as it is throughout the country. The Northamptonshire police quite often found that when it raided a brothel, the victims it discovered there would not co-operate. The force was pretty smart about that; it got the gangs who run the brothels on immigration laws, and got them expelled from the country, but that is not really a satisfactory way of dealing with the issue.
	I decided to try to get to grips with the subject by producing a pamphlet called "Slavery in the 21st century—the trade of human beings for sexual exploitation". The problem is that I have never been able to finish it. Every time I think I have finished it, I find out that the problem is greater and that there is more depth to it. I am grateful to Richard Britton and Miss Leigh Hooker for the research they have done on it. I had thought that the problem was simply one of bringing in people from abroad and putting them into prostitution. However, now we learn that people are trafficked within the United Kingdom, perhaps from Manchester to Cornwall. I hope that I will finish the pamphlet one day.
	I want to give a couple of examples of the way in which people are trafficked into this country. The all-party group met some child victims, who had been brought into the country and forced into prostitution. One young lady was very black and had been brought here when she was 14 by a middle-aged white man on a passport that did not include her name or picture. She was taken to Liverpool and forced into prostitution. She escaped, made her way back to London, found somebody who spoke her language and who took her to the authorities. Thankfully, the NSPCC intervened to look after her. I asked her whether she was shocked at being forced into the evil trade and repeatedly raped. She said, straight faced, "Well, of course, I was being forced to do it in Kenya before I came to this country." The hon. Member for Glasgow, North alluded to such matters earlier. The grinding poverty and the sort of activities that happen in the countries from where the victims come are also great problems.
	We are considering modern-day slavery. The victims have no rights and they are often locked up, but they are sometimes taken to what one might call public brothels. One might ask why they do not run away. The answer is that they are worried that their families might be intimidated. They are terrified of the traffickers and frightened that the most appalling things will happen to them. One might ask why they do not go to the police. The simple answer is that, in their country, the police are as corrupt as the traffickers. One does not have to go far to find an example. A reliable source attested that, at St. Thomas' hospital, a young lady ran out of the sexual diseases clinic along the corridor as fast as she could. She was pursued by an Albanian, who claimed that she was his property. That happened across the road from Parliament.
	I want to deal briefly with prostitution. I understand where many hon. Members come from on the subject, and I am interested in the outcome of the debate. There appears to be no difference in the number of trafficked victims into the Netherlands, Sweden and this country, yet we all have different rules on prostitution.

Fiona Mactaggart: I thank hon. Members in all parts of the House who have supported my campaign to tackle the demand side in prostitution, because that demand is specifically directed at trafficking. I should also like to apologise to House if, because of the shortness of time when I moved new clause 2 to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, my remarks misled people about the numbers of women involved in trafficking. I direct hon. Members to the corrected  Hansard on the matter.
	We need to start by asking what constitutes trafficking. I want to deal with that question, to ask why the most significant issue for Britain is trafficking for sexual exploitation and to argue that the Government must now do two things to reduce the impact such trafficking: first, reduce the demand for prostitution; and secondly, adopt a human rights approach to the victims of trafficking.
	What is trafficking? As the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) rightly pointed out, trafficking does not require the transport of people across borders. It does, however, require
	"the use of coercion, force or threats, including abduction...the use of deceit or fraud...the abuse of authority or influence or the exercise of pressure"
	and
	"the offer of payment."
	Those oppressive, abusive means, which are quoted in all the international protocols and framework decisions, result in consequences for the victim. However, her consent is not relevant, because of the abuse of power that is inherent in those means. It is important to understand that point. I argue that all women in prostitution are the victims of trafficking, whether they have come from another country or this one, because of the route that they have taken into prostitution, which almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers. It is important for us to understand that the experience of the prostituted woman is one of being trafficked, whether she was born in Moldova or Manchester.
	If we start from that understanding, we see how critical it is that the Government deal with demand. Traditionally, the Home Office has seen the pull factor in trafficking as its immigration policy. In fact, the pull factor is the demand for prostituted women. I welcome the hon. Gentleman's recognition that trafficking does not require transport across borders. However, I query his claims about the statistics for the number of women trafficked into countries that have legalised prostitution, because there is no doubt—nobody would dispute this—that there are more prostituted women in those countries. I dispute his figures, although there is an argument to be had about how many of them were brought across borders to be prostituted in those countries. However, there is no doubt that there are more women who are prostituted in countries that claim to regulate prostitution.
	Let us think about the ways in which the power over those trafficked women is exercised. Sometimes we are talking about women who are chained to radiators; more often we are talking about control in more subtle ways. As I have mentioned, control is frequently exercised through drug addiction, unpredictable violence, observing people or using witchdoctor techniques. A whole range of techniques can be used to keep women in a profession that puts their lives at risk. In every study, women in prostitution have been found to be 40 times more likely to die than other women of their age. In one US study, 50 per cent. of the prostituted women studied who had died had been murdered.
	If we are to tackle this, we need to establish a mechanism to reduce the number of women being murdered and to save huge numbers of women from violent exploitation. The first step is to reduce demand. Men who buy prostitutes become part of the chain of trafficking. Unlike people who buy trainers that have been made by exploited labour, the men who buy prostitutes are directly part of the chain. We should therefore take action to prevent them from becoming part of it. According to the advice of the UN special rapporteur, that should involve taking legislative action against the demand for prostitution. In her excellent report, the special rapporteur argues:
	"Demand created by prostitute-users is not the only factor that drives the sex trafficking market. However, it is the factor which has received the least attention and creative thought in anti-trafficking initiatives. By and large, anti-trafficking policy has been directed towards detecting, preventing and punishing the conduct of traffickers, or towards stemming the supply".
	If we were to reduce the demand in Britain, we would reduce the number of trafficked women.
	In addition, we can reduce the supply of women by helping them to exit prostitution. That is part of the human rights approach. We should invest much more effectively in exit schemes for women in prostitution, whether they have been trafficked from another country or trapped into prostitution by pimps in this country. It is a hard business for a woman to leave her pimp. One of the reasons that women and children are likely not only to be trafficked but to be re-trafficked is that they are vulnerable in the first place. It is hard for them to resist being re-trafficked, but if we have effective exit campaigns and support mechanisms that can help those trafficked and prostituted women, we can save many of them from the fate that too many of them face.
	It is striking that this is not only a human rights issue but a women's rights issue. As the UN special rapporteur points out in her report, many of the countries that supply women into prostitution, and supply the demand, have attitudes towards women that belittle and degrade them. That makes it more possible to see women as objects to be traded. If we create a culture—as the advertisements in our local newspapers do—that sees women as objects to be traded, more women will be trafficked. We know how to stop this, and I urge the Government to take urgent action to protect women from that trade.

Brooks Newmark: I am delighted to wrap up the Back-Bench contributions to this debate. I have always believed that this country should be rightly proud of the abolition of the slave trade as an outstanding act of moral and political courage. We should indeed celebrate the vision and courage of many of our predecessors without embarrassment, caveat, deep sorrow or apology. More importantly, however, we must continue to demonstrate to the international community that Britain does not, and will not, rest on its 19th century laurels, and that it will lead the 21st century fight against contemporary forms of slavery.
	The Bishop of Sheffield said in a sermon to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain that
	"we do not celebrate the end of slavery. For slavery is more rife in the world today than it was 250 years ago."
	It is one thing to point to the existence of a law, and quite another to uphold it. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague) said:
	"The legal argument has been won: laws against slavery exist in every country. The moral argument against such a thing is, of course, enduring".
	The focus for today's debate should be the enduring moral argument against slavery, not the achievements of the past or, indeed, the short-term initiatives of the present.
	The first thing that we must focus on is strengthening the perception that human trafficking is slavery. Since we are left today with a modern evolution of an age-old evil, we should preserve the word "slavery" to describe it. It is a shame that we have updated and, in some ways, sanitised modern-day slavery by calling it human trafficking. It has the same quality of moral ambiguity or neutrality as another famously cruel misnomer—the notion of "honour killing". I appreciate that the term is an international definition derived from the UN's Palermo protocol and the Council of Europe's convention, but "slavery" is a word that resonates with ordinary people, while "human trafficking" is more resonant with the mandarins than with the man on the street. I do not believe that that distinction is actually cosmetic.
	One of the challenges of combating human trafficking is raising awareness among those who create a demand for it—a point made by many hon. Members—and reducing demand is indeed a key factor in controlling the scale of the problem. Initiatives such as the Fairtrade label and Rugmark help prevent legitimate consumers from purchasing goods that have been produced using slave labour. Changing purchasing habits is clearly a step in the right direction. However, as operations such as Operation Pentameter and its successor demonstrate, the bigger challenge lies in raising awareness that human trafficking is very much akin to slavery so as to reduce the demand for its victims.
	Secondly, and more importantly, I am glad of the opportunity to focus on the Government's proposals for the future. Reading the Library briefs left me with the impression that the Government have been slightly drifting, if not actually stalling, on this issue in recent years. The Joint Committee on Human Rights referred in its 2006 report to some admirably alliterative goalposts for the Government's policy on trafficking: to prohibit and prevent trafficking, to prosecute and punish traffickers and to protect the victims of trafficking. One of the criticisms of the Government at that time was the failure to sign up to the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings.
	Along with every hon. Member, I welcome the recent moves by the Minister to speed up the ratification process, but it is a scandal that it took the UK so long even to sign the convention, let alone to proceed with the ratification process. The circumstances of the UK's very late signature of the convention were scarcely more edifying than those of the Prime Minister's signature to the Lisbon treaty. For the more cynically minded among us, it would be possible sometimes to see the Government's response in terms of gesture politics.  [Interruption.] The Leader of the House is saying "Oh, no", but the convention opened to signatories on 16 May 2005, while the Government did not get around to signing it until 23 March 2007, which—by coincidence, I am sure—was just two days before the bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807. I assume that the Minister would have signed on 25 March, had it not fallen on a Sunday in 2007. On 21 February last year, the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, gave the House a commitment to look into the issue of ratification of the convention and to report back. Yet it has taken nearly a year for a Minister to make a statement to this House; indeed, the Minister has come to the Dispatch Box only to respond to an Opposition motion. It is a great shame that the convention will enter into force next month without Britain at the fore.
	Thirdly, I want to conclude by challenging the Minister on some of the Government's specific objectives. Operation Pentameter was hailed as a great success and its successor is halfway through its six-month life. Can the Minister make any commitments about the Government's long-term strategy for the policing and prosecution of human trafficking, particularly in light of the decline in prosecutions under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 between 2006 and 2007?
	The UK's action plan for tackling human trafficking has been described as a living document that will continue to develop in order to accommodate evolving best practice, so what lessons have been learned from Operation Pentameter that will inform the Government's policy in future? Is the Home Office meeting with any success in its research into the nature and scale of the problem, which has historically been bedevilled by a lack of concrete statistical evidence? More specifically, how is the strategy continuing to evolve in the light of the continuing impact of EU enlargement?
	Finally, what steps are the Government taking to move away from ad hoc support for victims, paid for by periodic grants to the voluntary sector rather than by sustained funding? The POPPY project, for example, of which we have heard much this afternoon, was given a £2.4 million grant in April 2006, but the grant is to run over two years. I suspect that that decision will need to be revisited in the future. We need sustained funding, but we should also make full use of the capacity of safe accommodation—a point made earlier—by encouraging referrals and broadening referral criteria to include those under 18.
	I hope that the Government will act decisively to consolidate all the work that has already been done, and I hope that the United Kingdom will once again lead the world in the fight against slavery instead of allowing the pace of change to be set by others.

Andrew Robathan: rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
	 Question, That the Question be now put,  put and agreed to
	 Question put accordingly, That the original words stand part of the Question:—
	  The House proceeded to a Division.

Question accordingly negatived.
	 Question, That the proposed words be there added,  put forthwith, pursuant to Standing Order No. 31 (Questions on amendments), and agreed to.
	Mr Deputy Speaker  forthwith declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House condemns the trafficking of human beings as one of the most vile crimes to threaten our society; welcomes the Government's commitment to make the necessary legislative and procedural changes required to ratify the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings before the end of 2008; believes that ratification is an important milestone in the Government's concerted strategy to protect the victims of trafficking and bring to justice those who exploit them; notes that the UK Action Plan on Trafficking, published in March 2007 on the same day as the UK signed the Convention, comprehensively pulls together the work already under way across Government to tackle trafficking and creates a platform for future work; praises the work of the UK Human Trafficking Centre, established in March 2006 as the central point of expertise and operational co-ordination in tackling human trafficking; supports the valuable work done as part of nationwide police-led anti-trafficking operations, including Pentameter 1 and 2; and notes the £4.5 million of government funding provided over the last five years for victim protection under the Poppy scheme, which supports adult women trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation.

PETITIONS

Michael Jabez Foster: If that is the case, I certainly would agree. In my constituency there are thousands who have not just taken to the streets outside the post offices, but signed a petition against the closures, which they consider so important. I hope that such petitions will be given greater weight than my hon. Friend suggests.
	It is the foresight of this Government that makes this debate possible. The Labour Government have recognised the need for a social subsidy to maintain the network, which it is not possible to operate wholly on a market basis. I know that my hon. Friend the Minister has inherited the current situation, but whoever made the decision to allow the Post Office to envisage 2,500 closures was mistaken, especially if they believed that that could be done without major social distress.
	For reasons that I will come to in a moment, that was a wholly unnecessary proposition. The Government have given quite sufficient by way of subsidy to support the existing network. However, the real problem has been that getting figures from the Post Office about the projected losses is like pulling teeth. Only yesterday was I able to obtain the figures in respect of the four offices that are threatened with closure in Hastings and Rye. Having seen those figures, I encourage the Minister to stop the closures and challenge the Post Office to explain why it has come up with these foolhardy proposals.
	I shall return to the financial situation, but first I shall say a little about why the four offices in Hastings must not be sacrificed. The proposals announced on 13 November by Post Office Ltd were for the closure of four of our local sub-post offices—the Tilling Green post office in Rye, the Hastings Old Town post office, the White Rock post office and the St. Leonard's Green post office. Hastings is the 29th poorest town in the UK. We have an elderly population who both love and rely on their post office. There are people there whose quality of life depends significantly on access to their post offices. Mr. Alan Maxwell, sub-postmaster of White Rock post office, has been in the business for more than 20 years. The post office has been going for much longer than that, but now faces closure.
	Mr. Morley, a wheelchair-using patron of Tilling Green post office, cannot get to the main town post office that is seen as an alternative; it is simply not accessible. Mrs. Eileen Clarke currently uses the Hastings Old Town post office. She is diabetic; if she walked long distances, she would risk a fall or worse. The Reverend Humphrey Newman, a disabled gentleman, tells me that he can walk only short distances and that he finds the St. Leonard's Green post office a lifeline. Kyriacos Korniotis, the St. Leonard's Green sub-postmaster, tells me that many of his patrons come from numerous local care homes. He is now serving second and third-generation customers who would have enormous difficulties if the post office closed.
	As we have heard, thousands more have signed petitions to express their opposition to the proposed closures. No one supports the post office closures except the Post Office itself. It is no good telling people that they are 0.8 miles over hilly terrain from their nearest post office; they may as well be told that there is a particularly welcoming branch in Timbuktu.
	I am not a luddite who believes that services should always be maintained, regardless of cost; I accept that if a service is unsustainable, there comes a point when it cannot continue. However, the fact is that many post offices are not unprofitable in the conventional sense. Why are we punishing with no good cause the poor, disabled and local folk who often use the post office for social interaction? Just two years ago, the Post Office decided on a range of closures; it was then losing £2 million a week. It closed branches, apparently to become commercially viable. Now it loses £4 million a week. What has gone wrong? We need a new ambition from both the Government and Post Office management. Short-termist closure programmes do not offer the solution.
	I acknowledge that lifestyle changes mean that some of the services that were previously demanded are no longer required. However, that is not the whole story. The Horizon system, in which the Government invested just a few years ago, was to make the Post Office the public's very interface with the Government.
	I have to criticise Ministers lightly for how they have allowed public services, such as the BBC licence and the like, to be lost to our "in-house service". That must not happen again. A degree of public nepotism is needed if we are to ensure that our post offices are used in the way intended. It is, of course, absolutely essential that post offices be used as our local banks, and the sooner the Government give assurances about the security of the Post Office card account, the better.
	However, for all that, we are looking at the here and now. We are looking at a generous settlement from the Government, offering—as I said—£150 million a year of social subsidy. According to the Post Office, that is £18,000 a year for each office. Why, then, are we closing much-loved offices such as Tilling Green, the Hastings Old Town post office and others?
	Fortunately, as a result of the recent disclosures, I am able for the first time to offer my hon. Friend the Minister some advice on why I think the Post Office is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I have now received statistics in respect of the four local post offices that are candidates for closure. I do not have time to refer to them all, but I would like to take as an example the Tilling Green post office in Rye, run by sub-postmaster Roger Pankhurst. It shows why I believe that the Post Office's case is so fundamentally flawed. The figures show that Tilling Green makes an operating profit of £3,500 a year. That is the difference between what the Post Office pay the sub-postmaster for running the service and the income that he passes to the Post Office. Mr. Pankhurst has agreed that I should tell the House what he receives—£18,400 to run the service within the branch. He pays back the excess £3,500 to the Post Office. What is incredible is that the Post Office says that he makes a loss.
	Why is that? The Post Office adds infrastructure costs of more than £24,000. The post office at the local level costs £18,400, but the Post Office adds on-costs of £24,000. That is madness. Once those are set against the total cost, Mr. Pankhurst makes not a £3,500 profit but a loss of £10,000. These figures, which have not previously been published, at last show us where the real problem lies. How can the Post Office's central cost in supporting a local office significantly exceed the cost of running the office itself?
	Before decisions are made, it is necessary to look at the infrastructure costs. How are they made up? Where do they go? Where are the savings to be made? It appears that they are central transactional costs—that is, the costs of the business itself in relation to arranging bank accounts, paying out payments to claimants, and the like. I come to that view because of another figure that the Post Office has been able to give me. It has told me that if it closes Tilling Green, it will save £6,000 in infrastructure costs relating to that post office. It follows that the balance of £18,000 is the cost of the transactions.
	The problem is that if one takes those figures at face value and reduces the current infrastructure costs of £24,000 by £6,000, one is left with a figure of £18,000. The post office gets £10,000 towards that from other incomes at the centre. However, it effectively means that the migrating business will take with it a loss of nearly £8,000. That is nonsense. I can envisage local post offices saying, "Please, not here." That loss means in practice that an office that is profitable today will become unprofitable simply because of the migrating business. It is madness to close an office and then finish up by making another office even less profitable, and then no doubt include it in the next round of closures. Presumably, much of the loss attributed to the offices under threat may have come from the migration resulting from earlier decisions.
	It is manifestly the case that the problem is not the lack of profitability per se at Tilling Green or, for that matter, the Hastings Old Town post office—at least those two—but the vast infrastructure costs that are being incurred at the centre. If those central costs were trimmed by just a third, it would cost less—far less—than the average of £15,000 by which my hon. Friend the Minister has agreed to subsidise each of these post offices to keep them open. The Government have rightly recognised that social subsidy, which would rightly enable these offices to remain as they are, serving the public.
	As I said, we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The problem arises not at the local level but at the centre. We should have had the figures throughout—then the negotiation, consultation and petitions would have had a meaning—but at least we have them now. Such costs are not lost by the closure of local offices, or at least not the greater part of them. What is needed is not cosmetic surgery but a heart transplant right at the centre.
	If these decisions are not changed, what will I have to say to my 100-year-old constituent, Mrs. Roma Brierly, who has been using White Rock post office for many years and will now be cut off from what is, for her, is an essential service? What am I to tell the small businesses of the old town in Hastings, which find it hard enough already in a deprived area but will now have to travel to town to do their banking? Incidentally, they have already told me that it will not be at the Post Office. The figures that I have given to the Minister suggest that that may be just as well, because it loses everything that it touches.
	What am I to tell the lady who uses Tilling Green post office because she can park her mobility carriage outside, which is impossible at the town centre office that is the alternative? I am certainly not going to tell her that it is the Government's policy, because I do not believe that it is their policy to close these post offices. My constituents will be mystified when I tell them that, with all this Government subsidy, the Post Office management have chosen to punish them.
	I thank the Post Office management for at last, albeit late in the day, giving me the figures proving the real reason why these closures are being proposed. I want to ask the Minister whether local authorities are prepared to make up the shortfall, although that should not be their task. Will he recommend that the Post Office consider such an offer? Post Office officials have told me that they would be happy to consider it, but they want not only to cover their losses but a contribution to their potential profits, or savings as they call them. Such profits or savings, however, are fanciful and unproven. The track record shows that the transfer of business will make them even greater losses. At the very least, they are speculative. Given the level of Government subsidy, I hope that the Minister will say that making up the loss is all that would be required, if it is possible to bring people on board.
	By my calculations, the proposals are no quick fix. Compensation alone would take two years, in the case of two of my branches faced with closure; in the case of the office in the old town, it would take 42 years to recover the compensation, based on the loss proposed by the Post Office. That is an amazingly stupid thing to do, but that is the figure and I challenge anyone to challenge it.
	I am sorry to give my hon. Friend the Minister such a hard time because I know that the current plan is not of his making. I appreciate that he will be noble enough vicariously to defend the Post Office and what it proposes, but may I counsel him against that approach? If he were my client, I would advise him that he should put his hands up for this one. He should offer mitigation, and offer it as soon as possible. That would start with a new direction for the Post Office. We should remember that we own it. It is our Post Office; thankfully, it has not been privatised by his Government. I want him to tell them to rethink their plans, open the books, halt the closures, stop what they are doing and work out how the Post Office can be the proud organisation that we, as a Labour Government, want it to be.

Patrick McFadden: I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Michael Jabez Foster) on securing this debate on post office closures in his constituency. As he implied at the end of his speech, he practised as a solicitor before he entered Parliament, and based on what we have just heard and his many other speeches in the House, I am sure that he was a very effective spokesman for his clients; he certainly has been one for his constituents tonight.
	My hon. Friend mentioned the branches in his constituency—Tilling Green, White Rock, Hastings Old Town and St. Leonard's Green—and I appreciate his concern for those local communities. As I have said during previous debates on this issue, I understand that a difficult decision has been taken, which causes concern among hon. Members of all parties, and in the local communities represented. The Prime Minister talked a week or two ago about having to take difficult decisions in Government and I am afraid that this has been one such decision. I am in no doubt about the concern my hon. Friend has raised tonight. He made a number of detailed points and asked some detailed questions, particularly on post office financing, which I will come to, but I hope that he does not mind if I set out briefly why the decision was made and announced last May.
	At heart, the decision was driven by declining numbers of customers and increasing financial losses for the Post Office network. As my hon. Friend said, the number of customers has declined by about 4 million per week and losses are running at about £3.5 million per week. A number of lifestyle changes are driving those factors, which I think he understands, given his speech. By that, I mean greater use of direct debit to pay bills, more payment of benefits and pensions into bank accounts, greater use of online services to carry out transactions such as buying car tax and so on. I appreciate that not everyone is part of those trends, particularly elderly people, but they are nevertheless real and inevitably have an impact on the use and the finances of the Post Office network.
	On top of that, the Post Office operates in an increasingly competitive environment with other providers bidding for, and sometimes winning, work that has traditionally been carried out by the Post Office, such as the BBC's decision on the TV licence contract. My hon. Friend is absolutely right when he says that the Government do not see the Post Office as a commercial network. We appreciate the social and community role played by post offices and the value of a widespread network that, even after this round of closures, will be far bigger than all the banks and supermarkets put together. That is why we have committed a subsidy of £150 million a year to support the network, a subsidy that did not exist under the previous Administration. However despite the subsidy, the difficult decision was taken to reduce the size of the network, offset to some degree by the establishment of 500 new outreach services that may replace a post office with a part-time service or a service perhaps hosted by another partner in the community.
	I want to consider some of the specific points that my hon. Friend made. He raised several detailed issues about Post Office financing, especially the relationship between the central infrastructure costs and those of an individual branch. That is an important issue and I hope that I can clarify matters for him.
	My hon. Friend paid particular attention to the central infrastructure costs and asked how they could be higher in some instances than the payments to the agents who run the branches. If I explain what the costs entail, it may help. The payments to agents include two elements: a fixed fee and an additional, variable amount based on the business that the branch carries out. Post Office Ltd receives a mixture of fixed and variable income from its contracts with clients, for example, the Government, through the Post Office card account. However, increasingly, the trend in the competitive market, for example, in bill paying and so on, is for contracts to be based purely on transaction and service volumes, thus generating a variable income without being able to rely only on the fixed income. A declining number of contracts have a fixed income element geared towards covering network costs.
	In calculating the costs involved in a branch, Post Office Ltd allocates both income and infrastructure costs to an individual branch. My hon. Friend asked about the infrastructure costs. They reflect the large amount of support needed to sustain the largest retail network in the country and the franchise model operated by the Post Office. There is some difference between that franchise model and others.
	Unlike most franchise operations, in which franchisees source and pay for much of the supporting infrastructure themselves, Post Office Ltd covers virtually all the costs associated with providing its products. For example, two key elements are providing cash to the network and the IT system that supports it. The IT system links the whole network, facilitating and recording the wide range of services and financial transactions. Moving cash around the country and not charging branches for holding it are important parts of the central infrastructure support costs.
	Due to the nature of the business, especially paying out benefits, pensions and so on, there has to be a high specification of cash availability and robust contingency arrangements to ensure that post offices do not run out of money on payment days. That is an important and relatively costly element of the infrastructure costs. Other costs include maintenance of equipment, such as safes, alarm systems and other equipment in the post office, and the distribution of many leaflets and forms, often for accessing Government services. It is not unusual or surprising that those elements can form a sizeable part of the overall costs of a post office branch.
	The third element to be considered is the savings to Post Office Ltd, to which my hon. Friend alluded, from closing a branch. They include a proportion of, though not all, the infrastructure costs. That is because, although the cash may no longer have to be delivered to a specific office and the terminals for the IT may not be there, the Post Office still has central costs for maintaining such services nationwide. It therefore calculates that a proportion of, but not all, those costs will be saved when a branch closes.
	I appreciate that my hon. Friend is sceptical about that method of financing but it nevertheless exists and is an important part of the costs and calculations that are involved in supporting the network.

Patrick McFadden: What I am saying is that the infrastructure costs attributed to the branch will not all be saved if that branch is closed, because there are certain support costs—in IT or cash distribution networks, for example—that still have to be maintained, even though there is one less branch in the network.
	My hon. Friend was also sceptical about Post Office Ltd's assumptions about migration and business. I want to make two points about that. First, those assumptions are not plucked out of the air; they are based on the experience of urban reinvention and what happened after that. Secondly, the assumptions take into account local circumstances. Post Office Ltd therefore does not take a blanket approach throughout the country when calculating the migration of business; rather, it also takes into account the proximity of other branches nearby, and so on.
	Those are the main elements in calculating the costs of an individual branch. I am not quite sure whether I followed my hon. Friend when he quoted some of the figures that he extrapolated for the branch. The best way to understand the position is that Post Office Ltd takes into account three things. The first is the payment to agents, the second is the central infrastructure costs in support of the branch and the third is the cost that Post Office Ltd calculates it can save if it no longer supports that branch. All three are taken into account in calculating the cost to Post Office Ltd of running that branch.
	Overall, the programme is to close around 2,500 post offices, with 500 new outreach services. I understand that that will be difficult. However, the £150 million network subsidy payment is designed to help the Post Office maintain a network of that size, after that closure programme has taken place.
	My hon. Friend raised one or two other issues, which I hope to touch on in the time available to me. He asked about third parties wishing to step in and pick up the costs of the branch. I have encouraged Post Office Ltd to engage seriously with local authorities or other third parties in that position. However, it is also reasonable for Post Office Ltd to say that all costs associated with the branch must be covered and to ask for a long-term commitment. It would not do my hon. Friend's or any other hon. Member's constituents any good if someone stepped in, but six months later the branch was going through the same closure process. Post Office Ltd will rightly ask for all the relevant costs to be taken into account and for a commitment of several years in support. I hope that that is of some help to my hon. Friend.
	Overall, the programme will lead to a smaller network than we have now. However, I believe that it can be a more stable network, provided that Post Office Ltd do one other thing—innovate to attract more customers.
	My hon. Friend asked me about the Post Office card account. There is a successor product to POCA, which we have been legally required to put out to tender. I am sure that the Post Office will make a strong bid, but the outcome will have to be decided in a proper way. It is not possible for the Government simply to grant the contract to the Post Office without it tendering for it. The decision on that will be announced later this year.
	Innovation is important, and there is cause for optimism. Post Office Ltd has been setting out new products and services. It is now the biggest provider of foreign exchange in the UK, and is doing more in car insurance, broadband and free cash machines, as well as setting up a new, safe Christmas savings club, to help protect against some of the problems that we saw with Farepak a year or two ago.
	Post Office Ltd is innovating. With a combination of cost control in the network, continued Government support, which my hon. Friend has acknowledged and which I have repeated tonight, and the innovation necessary to attract more customers, we can put the network on a more stable basis for the future.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at eleven minutes to Eight o'clock.